5488 




ESSAYS 

OF 

EGBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 



ESSAYS 

OF 

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 



SELECTED AND EDITED 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES 

BY 

WILLIAM LYON PHELPS 

M.A. (harvard) PH.D. (YALE) 

FORMERLY INSTRUCTOR IN ENGLISH AT HARVARD 
LAMPSON PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE AT YALE 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1906 



?\15^ 



^ 



^%^^ 



UBHARY of CONGRESS 


Two Cnnies Received 


AUG 4 


1906 


JCoiiyri^ht Entry 


COPY 


XXc. No. 



Copyright, 1892, 1906, by 
Charles Sceibnee's Sons 



n 



^(T 



P 



J" 



THE DEVINNE PRE88 



PREFACE 

The text of the following essays is taken from the 
Thistle Edition of Stevenson's Works, published 
by Charles Scribner's Sons, in New York. I 
have refrained from selecting any of Stevenson's 
formal essays in literary criticism, and have chosen 
only those that, while ranking among his master- 
pieces in style, reveal his personality, character, 
opinions, philosophy, and faith. In the Introduction, 
I have endeavoured to be as brief as possible, merely 
giving a sketch of his life, and indicating some of 
the more notable sides of his literary achievement; 
pointing out also the literary school to which these 
Essays belong. A lengthy critical Introduction to a 
book of this kind would be an impertinence to the 
general reader, and a nuisance to a teacher. In the 
Notes, I have aimed at simple explanation and some 
extended literary comment. It is hoped that the gen- 
eral recognition of Stevenson as an English classic 
may make this volume useful in school and col- 
lege courses, while it is not too much like a textbook to 
repel the average reader. I am indebted to Professor 
Catterall of Cornell and to Professor Cross of Yale, 
and to my brother the Rev. Dry den W. Phelps, for 
some assistance in locating references. 

W. L. P. 

Yale University, 13 February 1906. 



CONTENTS 

Taqh 
Introduction ix 

Bibliography xxi 

----I On the Enjoyment of Unpleasant Places . 3 

Notes 14 

II An Apology for Idlers 21 

Notes 34 

III ^s Triplex 43 

Notes . . . . o 55 

IV Talk and Talkers .61 

Notes . 89 

^v A Gossip on Romance 101 

Notes = 118 

VI The Character of Dogs . . » 125 

Notes .138 

VII A College Magazine 143 

Notes . . c 155 

^rrii Books Which Have Influenced Me . . . . 159 

Notes o 168 

IX PuLVis et Umbra 173 

Notes 182 

vii 



INTRODUCTION 



LIFE OF STEVENSON 

Robert Louis Stevenson^ was born at Edinburgh 
on the 13 November 1850. His father, Thomas, and 
his grandfather, Robert, were both distinguished 
light-house engineers ; and the maternal grandfather, 
Balfour, was a Professor of Moral Philosophy, who 
lived to be ninety years old. There was, therefore, a 
combination of Lux et Veritas in the blood of young 
Louis Stevenson, which in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde 
took the form of a luminous portrayal of a great 
moral idea. 

In the language of Pope, Stevenson's life was a 
long disease. Even as a child, his weak lungs caused 
great anxiety to all the family except himself; but 
although Death loves a shining mark, it took over 
forty years of continuous practice for the grim 
archer to send the black arrow home. It is perhaps 

^ His name was originally Kobert Lewis Balfour Stevenson. 
He later dropped the ''Balfour" and changed the spelling 
of "Lewis" to ''Louis," but the name was always pro- 
nounced * ' Lewis. ' ' 

ix 



X INTRODUCTION 

fortunate for English literature that his health was 
no better; for the boy craved an active life, and 
would doubtless have become an engineer. He made 
a brave attempt to pursue this calling, but it was 
soon evident that his constitution made it impos- 
sible. After desultory schooling, and an immense 
amount of general reading, he entered the University 
of Edinburgh, and then tried the study of law. Al- 
though the thought of this profession became more 
and more repugnant, and finally intolerable, he 
passed his final examinations satisfactorily. This 
was in 1875. 

He had already begun a series of excursions to 
the south of France and other places, in search of a 
climate more favorable to his incipient malady ; and 
every return to Edinburgh proved more and more 
conclusively that he could not live in Scotch mists. 
He had made the acquaintance of a number of liter- 
ary men, and he was consumed with a burning am- 
bition to become a writer. Like Ibsen's Master- 
Builder, there was a troll in his blood, which drew 
him away to the continent on inland voyages with a 
canoe and lonely tramps with a donkey; these gave 
him material for books full of brilliant pictures, 
shrewd observations, and irrepressible humour. He 
contributed various articles to magazines, which were 
immediately recognised by critics like Leslie Stephen 
as bearing the unmistakable mark of literary genius ; 
but they attracted almost no attention from the gen- 
eral reading public, and their author had only the 
consciousness of good work for his reward. In 1880 
he was married. 

Stevenson's first successful work was Treasure 
Island, which was published in book form in 1883, 



INTRODUCTION 



XI 



and has already become a classic. This did not, 
however, bring him either a good income or general 
fame. His great reputation dates from the publi- 
cation of the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. 
Hyde, which appeared in 1886. That work had an 
instant and unqualified success, especially in Amer- 
ica, and made its author's name known to the whole 
English-speaking world. Kidnapped was published 
the same year, and another masterpiece, The Master 
of Ballantrae, in 1889. 

After various experiments with different climates, 
including that of Switzerland, Stevenson sailed 
for America in August 1887. The winter of 1887-88 
he spent at Saranac Lake, under the care of Dr. Tru- 
deau, who became one of his best friends. In 1890 
he settled at Samoa in the Pacific. Here he entered 
upon a career of intense literary activity, and yet 
found time to take an active part in the politics of 
the island, and to give valuable assistance in internal 
improvements. 

The end came suddenly, exactly as he would have 
wished it, and precisely as he had unconsciously 
predicted in the last radiant, triumphant sentences 
of his great essay, ^s Triplex. He had been at work 
on a novel, St. Ives, one of his poorer efforts, and 
whose composition grew steadily more and more dis- 
tasteful, until he found that he was actually writing 
against the grain. He threw this aside impatiently, 
and with extraordinary energy and enthusiasm be- 
gan a new story, Weir of Hermiston, which would 
undoubtedly have been his masterpiece, had he lived 
to complete it. In luminosity of style, in nobleness 
of conception, in the almost infallible choice of 
words, this astonishing fragment easily takes first 



xii INTRODUCTION 

place in Stevenson's productions. At the end of a 
day spent in almost feverish dictation, the third of 
December 1894, he suddenly fainted, and died 
without regaining consciousness. ''Death had not 
been suffered to take so much as an illusion from his 
heart. In the hot-fit of life, a-tiptoe on the highest 
point of being, he passed at a bound on to the other 
side. The noise of the mallet and chisel was scarcely 
quenched, the trumpets were hardly done blowing, 
when, trailing with him clouds of glory, this happy- 
starred, full-blooded spirit shot into the spiritual 
land." 

He was buried at the summit of a mountain, the 
body being carried on the shoulders of faithful 
Samoans, who might have sung Browning's noble 
hymn, 

**Let us begin and carry up this corpse, 

Singing together! 
Leave we the common crofts, the vulgar thorpes 

Each in its tether 

Sleeping safe on the bosom of the plain 

That 's the appropriate country; there, man's thought, 

Barer, intenser. 
Self -gathered for an outbreak, as it ought, 

Chafes in the censer. 
Leave we the unlettered plain its herd and crop; 

Seek we sepulture 

On a tall mountain 

Thither our path lies ; wind we up the heights : 

Wait ye the warning? 
Our low life was the level 's and the night 's ; 

He 's for the morning. 
Step to a tune, square chests, erect each head, 

'Ware the beholders! 
This is our master, famous, calm and dead, 

Borne on our shoulders 



INTRODUCTION jdii 

Here — here 's his place, where meteors shoot clouds form, 

Lightnings are loosened, 
Stars come and go! Let joy break with the storm, 

Peace let the dew send! 
Lofty designs must close in like effects 

Loftily lying, 
Leave him — still loftier than the world suspects, 

Living and dying/' 



n 

PERSONALITY AND CHARACTER 

Stevenson had a motley personality, which is suf- 
ficiently evident in his portraits. There was in him 
the Puritan, the man of the world, and the vagabond. 
There was something too of the obsolete soldier of 
fortune, with the cocked and feathered hat, worn 
audaciously on one side. There was also a touch of 
the elfin, the uncanny— the mysterious charm that 
belongs to the borderland between the real and the 
unreal world— the element so conspicuous and so 
indefinable in the art of Hawthorne. Writers so 
different as Defoe, Cooper, Poe, and Sir Thomas 
Browne, are seen with varying degrees of emphasis 
in his literary temperament. He was whimsical as 
an imaginative child ; and everyone has noticed that 
he never grew old. His buoyant optimism was 
based on a chronic experience of physical pain, for 
pessimists like Schopenhauer are usually men in 
comfortable circumstances, and of excellent bodily 
health. His courage and cheerfulness under de- 
pressing circumstances are so splendid to contem- 



xiv INTRODUCTION 

plate that some critics believe that in time his Letters 
may be regarded as his greatest literary work, for 
they are priceless in their unconscious revelation of 
a beautiful soul. 

Great as Stevenson was as a writer, he was still 
greater as a Man. So many admirable books have been 
written by men whose character will not bear exami- 
nation, that it is refreshing to find one Master- Artist 
whose daily life was so full of the fruits of the spirit. 
As his romances have brought pleasure to thousands 
of readers, so the spectacle of his cheerful march 
through the Valley of the Shadow of Death is a con- 
stant source of comfort and inspiration. One feels 
ashamed of cowardice and petty irritation after wit- 
nessing the steady courage of this man. His phi- 
losophy of life is totally different from that of 
Stoicism ; for the Stoic says, ' ' Grin and bear it, * ' and 
usually succeeds in doing neither. Stevenson seems 
to say, ''Laugh and forget it,'' and he showed us 
how to do both. 

Stevenson had the rather unusual combination 
of the Artist and the Moralist, both elements being 
marked in his writings to a very high degree. The 
famous and oft-quoted sonnet by his friend, the late 
Mr. Henley, gives a vivid picture : 

'' Thin-legged, thin-ehested, slight unspeakably, 
Neat-footed and weak-fingered : in his face — 
Lean, large-boned, curved of beak, and touched with race, 
Bold-lipped, rich-tinted, mutable as the sea, 
The brown eyes radiant with vivacity- 
There shown a brilliant and romantic grace, 
A spirit intense and rare, with trace on trace 
Of passion, impudence, and energy. 
Valiant in velvet, light in ragged luck, 
Most vain, most generous, sternly critical, 



INTRODUCTION xv 

Buffoon and poet, lover and sensualist; 
A deal of Ariel, just a streak of Puck, 
Much Antony, of Hamlet most of all, 
And something of the Shorter Catechist. ' ' 

He was not primarily a moral teacher, like Socrates 
or Thomas Carlyle; nor did he feel within him the 
voice of a prophetic mission. The virtue of his 
writings consists in their wholesome ethical quality, 
in their solid health. Fresh air is often better for 
the soul than the swinging of the priest's censer. 
At a time when the school of Zola was at its climax, 
Stevenson opened the windows and let in the pleasant 
breeze. For the morbid and unhealthy period of 
adolescence, his books are more healthful than many 
serious moral works. He purges the mind of un- 
cleanness, just as he purged contemporary fiction. 

As Stevenson's correspondence with his friends 
like Sidney Colvin and William Archer reveals the 
social side of his nature, so his correspondence with 
the Unseen Power in which he believed shows that 
his character was essentially religious. A man's 
letters are often a truer picture of his mind than a 
photograph ; and when these epistles are directed not 
to men and women, but to the Supreme Intelligence, 
they form a real revelation of their writer's heart. 
Nothing betrays the personality of a man more 
clearly than his prayers, and the following petition 
that Stevenson composed for the use of his household 
at Vailima, bears the stamp of its author. 

''At Morning. The day returns and brings us the 
petty round of irritating concerns and duties. Help 
us to play the man, help us to perform them with 
laughter and kind faces, let cheerfulness abound 
with, industry. Give us to go blithely on our business 



xvi INTRODUCTION 

all this day, bring us to our resting beds weary and 
content and undishonoured, and grant us in the end 
the gift of sleep." 



ni 

Stevenson's versatility 

Stevenson was a poet, a dramatist, an essayist, and 
a novelist, besides writing many political, geograph- 
ical, and biographical sketches. As a poet, his fame 
is steadily waning. The tendency at first was to rank 
him too high, owing to the undeniable charm of many 
of the poems in the Child's Garden of Verses. The 
child's view of the world, as set forth in these songs, 
is often originally and gracefully expressed; but 
there is little in Stevenson's poetry that is of per- 
manent value, and it is probable that most of it will 
be forgotten. This fact is in a way a tribute to his 
genius ; for his greatness as a prose writer has simply 
eclipsed his reputation as a poet. 

His plays were failures. They illustrate the 
familiar truth that a man may have positive genius 
as a dramatic writer, and yet fail as a dramatist. 
There are laws that govern the stage which must be 
obeyed ; play-writing is a great art in itself, entirely 
distinct from literary composition. Even Browning, 
the most intensely dramatic poet of the nineteenth 
century, was not nearly so successful in his dramas 
as in his dramatic lyrics and romances. 

His essays attracted at first very little attention; 



INTRODUCTION xvii 

they were too fine and too subtle to awaken popular 
enthusiasm. It was the success of his novels that 
drew readers back to the essays, just as it was the 
vo^e of Sudermann's plays that made his earlier 
novels popular. One has only to read such essays, 
however, as those printed in this volume to realise 
not only their spirit and charm, but to feel instinc- 
tively that one is reading English Literature. They 
are exquisite works of art, written in an almost im- 
peccable style. By many judicious readers, they are 
placed above his works of fiction. They certainly 
constitute the most original portion of his entire 
literary output. It is astonishing that this young 
Scotchman should have been able to make so many 
actually new observations on a game so old as Life. 
There is a shrewd insight into the motives of human 
conduct that makes some of these graceful sketches 
belong to the literature of philosophy, using the 
word philosophy in its deepest and broadest sense. 
The essays are filled with whimsical paradoxes, keen 
and witty as those of Bernard Shaw, without having 
any of the latter 's cynicism, iconoclasm, and sinister 
attitude toward morality. For the real foundation 
of even the lightest of Stevenson's works is in- 
variably ethical. 

His fame as a writer of prose romances grows 
brighter every year. His supreme achievement was 
to show that a book might be crammed with the 
most wildly exciting incidents, and yet reveal pro- 
found and acute analysis of character, and be written 
with consummate art. His tales have all the fertility 
of invention and breathless suspense of Scott and 
Cooper, while in literary style they immeasurably 
surpass the finest work of these two great masters. 



xviii INTRODUCTION 

His best complete story, is, I think, Treasure Island. 
There is a peculiar brightness about this book which 
even the most notable of the later works failed to 
equal. Nor was it a trifling feat to make a blind man 
and a one-legged man so formidable that even the 
reader is afraid of them. Those who complain that 
this is merely a pirate story forget that in art the 
subject is of comparatively little importance, where- 
as the treatment is everything. To say, as some do, 
that there is no difference between Treasure Island 
and a cheap tale of blood and thunder, is equivalent 
to saying that there is no difference between the 
Sistine Madonna and a chromo Virgin. 



IV] 

THE PERSONAL ESSAY 

The Personal Essay is a peculiar form of literature, 
entirely different from critical essays like those of 
Matthew Arnold and from purely reflective essays, 
like those of Bacon. It is a species of writing some- 
what akin to autobiography or firelight conversa- 
tion ; where the writer takes the reader entirely into 
his confidence, and chats pleasantly with him on 
topics that may be as widely apart as the immortal- 
ity of the soul and the proper colour of a neckti^. 
The first and supreme master of this manner of 
writing was Montaigne, who belongs in the front 
rank of the world's greatest writers of prose. Mon- 
taigne talks endlessly on the most trivial subjects 



INTRODUCTION xix 

without ever becoming trivial. To those who really 
love reading- and have some sympathy with human- 
ity, Montaigne's Essays are a ^'perpetual refuge and 
delight," and it is interesting to reflect how far in 
literary fame this man, who talked about his meals, 
his horse, and his cat, outshines thousands of schol- 
arly and talented writers, who discussed only the 
most serious themes in politics and religion. The 
great English prose writers in the field of the per- 
sonal essay during the seventeenth century were Sir 
Thomas Browne, Thomas Fuller, and Abraham 
Cowley, though Walton's Compleat Angler is a kin- 
dred work. Browne's Religio Medici, and his de- 
lightful Garden of Cyrus, old Tom Fuller's quaint 
Good Thoughts in Bad Times and Cowley's charm- 
ing Essays are admirable examples of this school of 
composition. Burton's wonderful Anatomy of 
Melancholy is a colossal personal essay. Some of the 
papers of Bteele and Addison in the Tatler, 
Guardian, and the Spectator are of course notable; 
but it was not until the appearance of Charles Lamb 
that the personal essay reached its climax in English 
literature. Over the pages of the Essays of Elia 
hovers an immortal charm — the charm of a nature 
inexhaustible in its humour and kindly sympathy for 
humanity) Thackeray was another great master of 
the literary easy-chair, and 's to some readers more 
attractive in this attitude than as a novelist. In 
America we have had a few writers who have reached 
eminence in this form, beginning with Washington 
Irving, and including Donald G. Mitchell, whose 
Reveries of a Bachelor has been read by thousands 
of people for over fifty years. 

As a personal essayist Stevenson seems already to 



XX 



INTRODUCTION 



belong to the first rank. He is both eclectic and in- 
dividual. He brought to his pen the reminiscences 
of varied reading, and a wholly original touch of 
fantasy. He was literally steeped in the gorgeous 
Gothic diction of the seventeenth century, but he 
realised that such a prose style as illumines the pages 
of William Drummond's Cypress Grove and 
Browne's Urn Burial was a lost art. He attempted 
to imitate such writing only in his youthful exer- 
cises, for his own genius was forced to express itself 
in an original way. All of his personal essays have 
that air of distinction which attracts and holds one 's 
attention as powerfully in a book as it does in social 
intercourse. Everything that he has to say seems 
immediately worth saying, and worth hearing, for he 
was one of those rare men who had an interesting 
mind. There are some literary artists who have style 
and nothing else, just as there are some great singers 
who have nothing but a voice. The true test of a 
book, like that of an individual, is whether or not it 
improves upon acquaintance. Stevenson's essays 
reflect a personality that becomes brighter as we 
draw nearer. This fact makes his essays not merely 
entertaining reading, but worthy of serious and 
prolonged study. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

The following information is taken from Col. Prideaux's adr 
mirable Bibliography of Stevenson, London, 1903. I have given 
the titles and dates of only the more important publications in 
book form ; and of the critical works on Stevenson, I have in- 
cluded only a few of those that seem especially useful to the 
student and general reader. The detailed facts about the 
separate publications of each essay included in the present 
volume are fully given in my notes. 

WORKS 

1878. An Inland Voyage. 

1879. Travels with a Donkey. 

1881. Virginibus Puerisque. 

1882. Familiar Studies of Men and Books. 

1882. New Arabian Nights. 

1883. Treasure Island. 
1885. Prince Otto. 

1885. A Child's Garden of Verses. 

1885. More New Arabian Nights. The Dynamiter. 

1886. Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. 

1886. Kidnapped. 

1887. The Merry Men. 

1887. Memories and Portraits. 

1888. The Black Arrow. 

1889. The Master of Ballantrae. (A few copies privately 

printed in 1888.) 

1889. The Wrong Box. 

1890. Father Damien. 

xxi 



xxii BIBLIOGRAPHY 



1892. 


Across the Plains. 


1892. 


The Wrecker. 


1893. 


Island Nights' Entertainments. 


1893. 


Catriona. 


1894. 


The Ebb Tide. 


1895. 


Vaihma Letters. 


1896. 


Weir of Hermiston. 


1898. 


St. Ives. 


1899. 


Letters, Two Volumes. 



Note. The Edinburgh Edition of the worJcs, in twenty-eight 
volumes, is often referred to by bibliographers ; it can now be 
obtained only at second-hand bookshops, or at auction sales. 
The best complete edition on the market is the Thistle Edition, 
in twenty-six volumes, including the Life and the Letters, pub- 
lished by Charles Scribner's Sons, New York. 

WORKS ON STEVENSON 
lAfe of Bohert Louis Stevenson, by Graham Balfour. 1901 
Two Volumes. 

Tliis is the standard Life, and indispensable. 

Robert Louis Stevenson, by Henry James, in Partial 
Portraits, 1894. 

Admirable criticism. 

Robert Louis Stevenson, by Walter Raleigh. 1895. 

An excellent appreciation of his character and worTc. 

Robert Louis Stevenson: Personal Memories, by Edmund 
Gosse, in Critical Kit-Kats, 1896. 
Entertaining gossip. 
Stevenson's Shrine, TJie Record of a Pilgrimage, by Laura 

Stubbs. 1903. 

Very interesting full-page illustrations. 

(For further critical books and articles, which are numerous, con^ 

suit Prideaux.) 



ESSAYS 

OP 

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 



I 



ON THE ENJOYMENT OF 
UNPLEASANT PLACES 



IT is a difficult matter to make the most of any 
given place, and we have much in our own power. 
Things looked at patiently from one side after an- 
other generally end by showing a side that is beau- 
tiful. A few months ago some words were said in 
the Portfolio as to an ''austere regimen in scenery'*; 
and such a discipline was then recommended as 
"healthful and strengthening to the taste/' That 
is the text, so to speak, of the present essay. This 
discipline in scenery, it must be understood, is some- 
thing more than a mere walk before breakfast to 
whet the appetite. For when we are put down in 
some unsightly neighborhood, and especially if 
we have come to be more or less dependent on what 
we see, we must set ourselves to hunt out beautiful 
things with all the ardour and patience of a botanist 
after a rare plant. Day by day we perfect ourselves 
in the art of seeing nature more favourably. We 
learn to live with her, as people learn to live with 
fretful or violent spouses : to dwell lovingly on what 
is good, and shut our eyes against all that is bleak 
or inharmonious. We learn, also, to come to each 



4 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

place in the right spirit. The traveller, as Brantome 
quaintly tells us, *'fait des discours en soi pour se 
soiitenir en chemin''; and into these discourses 
he weaves something out of all that he sees and suf- 
fers by the way; they take their tone greatly from 
the varying character of the scene; a sharp ascent 
brings different thoughts from a level road ; and the 
man's fancies grow lighter as he comes out of the 
wood into a clearing. Nor does the scenery any 
more affect the thoughts than the thoughts affect 
the scenery. We see places through our humours 
as through differently colored glasses. We are our- 
selves a term in the equation, a note of the chord, 
and make discord or harmony almost at will. There 
is no fear for the result, if we can but surrender 
ourselves sufficiently to the country that surrounds 
and follows us, so that we are ever thinking suitable 
thoughts or telling ourselves some suitable sort of 
story as we go. We become thus, in some sense, a 
centre of beauty ; we are provocative of beauty, much 
as a gentle and sincere character is provocative of 
sincerity and gentleness in others. And even where 
there is no harmony to be elicited by the quickest 
and most obedient of spirits, we may still embellish 
a place with some attraction of romance. We may 
learn to go far afield for associations, and handle 
them lightly when we have found them. Sometimes 
an old print comes to our aid; I have seen many a 
spot lit up at once with picturesque imaginations, 
by a reminiscence of Callot, or Sadeler, or Paul 
Brill. Dick Turpin has been my lay figure for many 
an English lane. And I suppose the Trossachs would 
hardly be the Trossachs for most tourists if a man 
of admirable romantic instinct had not peopled it 



ENJOYMENT OF UNPLEASANT PLACES 5 

for them with harmonious figures, and brought them 
thither their minds rightly prepared for the impres- 
sion. There is half the battle in this preparation. 
For instance: I have rarely been able to visit, in 
the proper spirit, the wild and inhospitable places 
of our own Highlands. I am happier where it is 
tame and fertile, and not readily pleased without 
■*trees. I understand that there are some phases of 
mental trouble that harmonise well with such sur- 
roundings, and that some persons, by the dispensing 
power of the imagination, can go back several cen- 
turies in spirit, and put themselves into sympathy 
with the hunted, houseless, unsociable way of life 
that was in its place upon these savage hills. Now, 
when I am sad, I like nature to charm me out of 
my sadness, like David before Saul ; and the thought 
of these past ages strikes nothing in me but an 
unpleasant pity ; so that I can never hit on the right 
humour for this sort of landscape, and lose much 
pleasure in consequence. Still, even here, if I were 
only let alone, and time enough were given, I should 
have all manner of pleasure, and take many clear 
and beautiful images away with me when I left. 
When we cannot think ourselves into sympathy with 
the great features of a country, we learn to ignore 
them, and put our head among the grass for flowers, 
or pore, for long times together, over the changeful 
current of a stream. We come down to the sermon 
in stones, when we are shut out from any poem in 
the spread landscape. We begin to peep and 
botanise, we take an interest in birds and insects, 
we find many things beautiful in miniature. The 
reader will recollect the little summer scene in 
Wuthering Heights— the one warm scene, perhaps, 



6 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

in all that powerful, miserable novel— and the great 
feature that is made therein by grasses and flowers 
and a little sunshine : this is in the spirit of which I 
now speak. And, lastly, we can go indoors ; interiors 
are sometimes as beautiful, often more picturesque, 
than the shows of the open air, and they have that 
quality of shelter of which I shall presently have 
more to say. 

With all this in mind, I have often been tempted 
to put forth the paradox that any place is good 
enough to live a life in, while it is only in a few, 
and those highly favoured, that we can pass a few 
hours agreeably. For, if we only stay long enough, 
we become at home in the neighbourhood. Reminis- 
cences spring up, like flowers, about uninteresting 
corners. We forget to some degree the superior 
loveliness of other places, and fall into a tolerant 
and sympathetic spirit which is its own reward and 
justification. Looking back the other day on some 
recollections of my own, I was astonished to find how 
much I owed to such a residence; six weeks in one 
unpleasant country-side had done more, it seemed, 
to quicken and educate my sensibilities than many 
years in places that jumped more nearly with my 
inclination. 

The country to which I refer was a level and tree- 
less plateau, over which the winds cut like a 
whip. For miles on miles it was the same. 
A river, indeed, fell into the sea near the town 
where I resided; but the valley of the river was 
shallow and bald, for as far up as ever I had the 
heart to follow it. There were roads, certainly, but 
roads that had no beauty or interest; for, as there 
was no timber, and but little irregularity of surface, 



ENJOYMENT OF UNPLEASANT PLACES 7 

you saw your whole walk exposed to you from the 
beginning: there was nothing left to fancy, nothing 
to expect, nothing to see by the wayside, save here 
and there an unhomely-looking homestead, and here 
and there a solitary, spectacled stone-breaker; and 
you were only accompanied, as you went doggedly 
forward by the gaunt telegraph-posts and the hum 
of the resonant wires in the keen sea-wind. To one 
who has learned to know their song in warm pleasant 
places by the Mediterranean, it seemed to taunt the 
country, and make it still bleaker by suggested con- 
trast. Even the waste places by the side of the 
road were not, as Hawthorne liked to put it, ^' taken 
back to Nature" by any decent covering of vegeta- 
tion. Wherever the land had the chance, it seemed 
to lie fallow. There is a certain tawny nudity of 
the South, bare sunburnt plains, coloured like a lion, 
and hills clothed only in the blue transparent air; 
but this was of another description — this was the 
nakedness of the North; the earth seemed to know 
that it was naked, and was ashamed and cold. 

It seemed to be always blowing on that coast. In- 
deed, this had passed into the speech of the inhab- 
itants, and they saluted each other when they met 
with ''Breezy, breezy," instead of the customary 
''Fine day" of farther south. These continual 
winds were not like the harvest breeze, that just 
keeps an equable pressure against your face as you 
walk, and serves to set all the trees talking over 
your head, or bring round you the smell of the 
wet surface of the country after a shower. They 
were of the bitter, hard, persistent sort, that inter- 
feres with sight and respiration, and makes the eyes 
sore. Even such winds as these have their own 



8 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

merit in proper time and place. It is pleasant to 
see them brandish, great masses of shadow. And 
what a power they have over the colour of the world ! 
How they rufSe the solid woodlands in their passage, 
and make them shudder and whiten like a single 
willow ! There is nothing more vertiginous than a 
wind like this among the woods, with all its sights 
and noises; and the effect gets between some 
painters and their sober eyesight, so that, even when 
the rest of their picture is calm, the foliage is col- 
oured like foliage in a gale. There was nothing, 
however, of this sort to be noticed in a country Avhere 
there were no trees and hardly any shadows, save 
the passive shadows and clouds or those of rigid 
houses and walls. But the wind was nevertheless 
an occasion of pleasure ; for nowhere could you taste 
more fully the pleasure of a sudden lull, or a place 
of opportune shelter. The reader knows what I mean ; 
he must remember how, when he has sat himself 
down behind a dyke on a hill-side, he delighted to 
hear the wind hiss vainly through the crannies at 
his back ; how his body tingled all over with warmth, 
and it began to dawn upon him, with a sort of slow 
surprise, that the country was beautiful, the heather 
purple, and the faraway hills all marbled with sun 
and shadow. Wordsworth, in a beautiful passage 
of the "Prelude," has used this as a figure for the 
feeling struck in us by the quiet by-streets of London 
after the uproar of the great thoroughfares ; and the 
comparison may be turned the other way with as 
good effect : 

" Meanwhile the roar continues, till at length, 
Escaped as from an enemy we turn, 



ENJOYMENT OF UNPLEASANT PLACES 9 

Abruptly into some sequester'd nook, 

Still as a shelter'd place when winds blow loud!" 

I remember meeting a man once, in a train, who 
told me of what must have been quite the most per- 
fect instance of this pleasure of escape. He had 
gone up, one sunny, windy morning, to the top of 
a great cathedral somewhere abroad; I think it was 
Cologne Cathedral, the great unfinished marvel by 
the Rhine ; and after a long while in dark stairways, 
he issued at last into the sunshine, on a platform 
high above the town. At that elevation it was quite 
still and warm; the gale was only in the lower 
strata of the air, and he had forgotten it in the 
quiet interior of the church and during his long 
ascent ; and so you may judge of his surprise when, 
resting his arms on the sunlit balustrade and look- 
ing over into the Place far below him, he saw the 
good people holding on their hats and leaning hard 
against the wind as they walked. There is something, 
to my fancy, quite perfect in this little experience 
of my fellow-traveller's. The ways of men seem 
always very trivial to us when we find ourselves 
alone on a church-top, with the blue sky and a few 
tall pinnacles, and see far below us the steep roofs 
and foreshortened buttresses, and the silent activity 
of the city streets; but how much more must they 
not have seemed so to him as he stood, not only 
above other men's business, but above other men's 
climate, in a golden zone like Apollo 's ! 

This was the sort of pleasure I found in the coun- 
try of which I write. The pleasure was to be out of 
the wind, and to keep it in memory all the time, 
and hug oneself upon the shelter. And it was only 



10 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

by the sea that any such sheltered places were to 
be found. Between the black worm-eaten headlands 
there are little bights and havens, well screened from 
the wind and the commotion of the external sea, 
where the sand and weeds look up into the gazer's 
face from a depth of tranquil water, and the sea- 
birds, screaming and flickering from the ruined 
crags, alone disturb the silence and the sunshine. 
One such place has impressed itself on my memory 
beyond all others. On a rock by the water 's edge, old 
fighting men of the Norse breed had planted a 
double castle; the two stood wall to wall like semi- 
detached villas; and yet feud had run so high be- 
tween their owners, that one, from out of a window, 
shot the other as he stood in his own doorway. There 
is something in the juxtaposition of these two enemies 
full of tragic irony. It is grim to think of bearded 
men and bitter women taking hateful counsel to- 
gether about the two hall-fires at night, when the 
sea boomed against the foundations and the wild 
winter wind was loose over the battlements. And 
in the study we may reconstruct for ourselves some 
pale figure of what life then was. Not so when we 
are there ; when we are there such thoughts come to 
us only to intensify a contrary impression, and asso- 
ciation is turned against itself. I remember walking 
thither three afternoons in succession, my eyes 
weary with being set against the wind, and how, 
dropping suddenly over the edge of the down, I 
found myself in a new world of warmth and shelter. 
The wind, from which I had escaped, ''as from an 
enemy," was seemingly quite local. It carried no 
clouds with it, and came from such a quarter that 
it did not trouble the sea within view. The two 



ENJOYMENT OF UNPLEASANT PLACES 11 

castles, black and ruinous as the rocks about them, 
were still distinguishable from these by something 
more insecure and fantastic in the outline, something 
that the last storm had left imminent and the next 
would demolish entirely. It would be difficult to 
render in words the sense of peace that took posses- 
sion of me on these three afternoons. It was helped 
out, as I have said, by the contrast. The shore was 
battered and bemauled by previous tempests; I had 
the memory at heart of the insane strife of the 
pigmies who had erected these two castles and lived 
in them in mutual distrust and enmity, and knew 
I had only to put my head out of this little cup 
of shelter to find the hard wind blowing in my eyes ; 
and yet there were the two great tracts of motionless 
blue air and peaceful sea looking on, unconcerned 
and apart, at the turmoil of the present moment and 
the memorials of the precarious past. There is ever 
something transitory and fretful in the impression 
of a high wind under a cloudless sky; it seems to 
have no root in the constitution of things; it must 
speedily begin to faint and wither away like a cut 
flower. And on those days the thought of the wind 
and the thought of human life came very near to- 
gether in my mind. Our noisy years did indeed 
seem moments in the being of the eternal silence: 
and the wind, in the face of that great field of 
stationary blue, was as the wind of a butterfly's 
wing. The placidity of the sea was a thing likewise 
to be remembered. Shelley speaks of the sea as 
"hungering for calm," and in this place one learned 
to understand the phrase. Looking down into these 
green waters from the broken edge of the rock, or 
swimming leisurely in the sunshine, it seemed to 



12 STEVENSON'S ESSAIS 

me that they were enjoying their own tranquillity; 
and when now and again it was disturbed by a wind 
ripple on the surface, or the quick black passage of 
a fish far below, they settled back again (one could 
fancy) with relief. 

On shore, too, in the little nook of shelter, every- 
thing was so subdued and still that the least par- 
ticular struck in me a pleasurable surprise. The 
desultory crackling of the whin-pods in the afternoon 
sun usurped the ear. The hot, sweet breath of the 
bank, that had been saturated all day long with 
sunshine, and now exhaled it into my face, was 
like the breath of a fellow-creature. I remember 
that I was haunted by two lines of French verse; 
in some dumb way they seemed to fit my surround- 
ings and give expression to the contentment that 
was in me, and I kept repeating to myself— 

" Mon coeur est un luth suspendu, 
Sitot qu'on le touche, il resonne." 

I can give no reason why these lines came to me at 
this time ; and for that very cause I repeat them here. 
For all I know, they may serve to complete the im- 
pression in the mind of the reader, as they were cer- 
tainly a part of it for me. 

And this happened to me in the place of all others 
where I liked least to stay. When I think of it I 
prcw ashamed of my own ingratitude. "Out of the 
strong came forth sweetness." There, in the bleak 
and gusty Ncrth, I received, perhaps, my strongest 
impression of peace. I saw the sea to be great and 
calm; and the earth, in that little corner, was all 
alive and friendly to me. So, wherever a man is. 



ENJOYMENT OF UNPLEASANT PLACES 13 

he will find something to please and pacify him : in 
the town he will meet pleasant faces of men and 
women, and see beautiful flowers at a window, or 
hear a cage-bird singing at the corner of the gloomiest 
street ; and for the country, there is no country with- 
out some amenity— let him only look for it in the 
right spirit, and he will surely find. 



NOTES 



THIS article first appeared in the Portfolio, for 
November 1874, and was not reprinted until two 
years after Stevenson's death, in 1896, Avhen it was in- 
cluded in the Miscellanies (Edinburgh Edition, Miscel- 
lanies, Vol. IV, pp. 131-142). The editor of the Port- 
folio was the well-known art critic, Philip Gilbert Hamer- 
ton (1834-1894), author of the Intellectual Life (1873). 
Just one year before, Stevenson had had printed in the 
Portfolio his first contribution to any periodical, Roads. 
Although The Enjoyment of Unpleasant Places attracted 
scarcely any attention on its first appearance, and has 
since become practically forgotten, there is perhaps no 
better essay among his earlier works with which to begin 
a study of his personality, temperament, and style. In 
its cheerful optimism this article is particularly character- 
istic of its author. It should be remembered that when 
this essay was first printed, Stevenson was only twenty- 
four years old. 

Page 3. It is a difficult matter, etc. The appreciation 
of nature is a quite modern taste, for although people 
have always loved the scenery which reminds them of 
home, it was not at all fashionable in England to love 
nature for its own sake before 1740. Thomas Gray was 
the first person in Europe who seems to have exhibited a 
real love of mountains (see his Letters). A study of 
the development of the appreciation of nature before 
and after Wordsworth (England's greatest nature poet) 
is exceedingly interesting. See Myra Reynolds, The 

14 



NOTES 15 

Treatment of Nature in English Poetry between Pope 
and Wordsworth (1896). 

Page 3. This discipline in scenery. Note what is said 
on this subject in BroAvning's extraordinary poem, Fra 
Lippo Lippi, vs. 300-302. 

"For, donH you mark? We're made so that we love 
First when we see them painted, things we have 

passed 
Perhaps a hundred times nor eared to see." 

Page 4. Brantome quaintly tells us, "fait des discours 
en soi pour se soutenir en chemin." Freely translated, 
"the traveller talks to himself to keep up his courage on 
the road." Pierre de Bourdeille, Abbe de Brantome, 
(cir. 1534-1614), travelled all over Europe. His works 
were not published till long after his death, in 1665. 
Several complete editions of his writings in numerous 
volumes have appeared in the nineteenth century, one 
edited by the famous writer, Prosper Merimee. 

Page 4. We are provocative of beauty. Compare 
again, Fra Lippo Lippi, vs. 215 et seq. 

"Or say there 's beauty with no soul at all — 
(I never saw it— put the ease the same—) 
If you get simple beauty and nought else. 
You get about the best thing God invents: 
That 's somewhat : and you '11 find the soul 

you have missed. 
Within yourself, when j^ou return him thanks." 

Page 4. C allot, or Sadeler, or Paul Brill. Jacques 
Callot was an eminent French artist of the XVII century, 
born at Nancy in 1592, died 1635. Matthaeus and Paul 
Brill were two celebrated Dutch painters. Paul, the 
younger brother of Matthaeus, was born about 1555, and 



16 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

died in 1626. His development in landscape-painting was 
remarkable. Gilles Sadeler, born at Antwerp 1570, died 
at Prague 1629, a famous artist, and nephew of two well- 
known engravers. He was called the "Phoenix of En- 
graving." 

Page 4. Dick Turpin. Dick Turpin was born in 
Essex, England, and was originally a butcher. Afterwards 
he became a notorious highwayman, and was finally 
executed for horse-stealing, 10 April 1739. He and his 
steed Black Bess are well described in W. H. Ainsworth's 
Rookwood, and in his Ballads. 

Page 4. The Trossachs. The word means literally, 
"bristling country." A beautifully romantic tract, be- 
ginning immediately to the east of Loch Katrine in Perth, 
Scotland. Stevenson's statement, "if a man of admirable 
romantic instinct had not peopled it for them with 
harmonious figures," refers to Walter Scott, and more 
particularly to the Lady of the Lake (1810). 

Page 5. I am happier ivhere it is tame and fertile, and 
not readily pleased without trees. Notice the kind of 
country he begins to describe in the next paragraph. Is 
there really any contradiction in his statements? 

Page 5. Like David before Saul. David charmed Saul 
out of his sadness, according to the Biblical story, not 
with nature, but with music. See I Samuel XVI. 14-23. 
But in Browning's splendid poem, Saul (1845), nature 
and music are combined in David's inspired playing. 

"And I first played the tune all our sheep know," etc. 

Page 5. The sermon in stones. See the beginning of 
the second act of As You Like It, where the exiled Duke 
says, 

"And this our life exempt from public haunt 
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, 
Sermons in stones and good in everything." 



NOTES 17 

It is not at all certain that Shakspere used the word 
'^'sermons" here in the modern sense; he very likely meant 
merely discourses, conversations. 

Page 5. Wuthering Heights. The well-known novel 
(1847) by Emily Bronte (1818-1848) sister of the more 
famous Charlotte Bronte. The "little summer scene" 
Stevenson mentions, is in Chapter XXIV. 

Page 7. A solitary, spectacled stone-breaker. To the 
pedestrian or cyclist, no difference between Europe and 
America is more striking than the comparative excellence 
of the country roads. The roads in Europe, even in 
lonely and remote districts, where one may travel for 
hours without seeing a house, are usually in perfect 
condition, hard, white and absolutely smooth. The 
slightest defect or abrasion is immediately repaired by 
one of these stone-breakers Stevenson mentions, a solitary 
individual, his eyes concealed behind large green goggles, 
to protect them from the glare and the flying bits of stone. 

Page 7. Ashamed and cold. An excellent example of 
what Ruskin called "the pathetic fallacy." 

Page 8. The foliage is coloured like foliage in a gale. 
Cf . Tennyson, In Memoriam, LXXII : — 



"With blasts that blow the poplar white." 



Page 8. Wordsivorth, in a beautiful passage. The 
passage Stevenson quotes is in Book VII of The Prelude, 
called Residence in London. 

Page 9. Cologne Cathedral, the great unfinished marvel 
by the Rhine. This great cathedral, generally regarded 
as the most perfect Gothic church in the world, was begun 
in 1248, and was not completed until 1880, seven years 
after Stevenson wrote this essay. 

Page 9. In a golden zone like Apollo's. The Greek 
God Apollo, later identified with Helios, the Sun-god. 



18 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

The twin towers of Cologne Cathedral are over 500 feet 
high, so that the experience described here is quite 
possible. 

Page 10. The two hall-fires at night. In mediaeval 
castles, the hall was the general living-room, used regu- 
larly for meals, for assemblies, and for all social require- 
ments. The modern word "dining-hall" preserves the 
old significance of the word. The familiar expression, 
"bower and hall," is simply, in plain prose, bedroom and 
sitting-room. 

Page 10. Association is turned against itself. It is 
seldom that Stevenson uses an expression that is not 
instantly transparently clear. Exactly what does he mean 
by this phrase? 

Page 10. "J.S from an enemy.'' Alluding to the passage 
Stevenson has quoted above, from Wordsworth's Prelude. 

Page 11. Our noisy years did indeed seem moments. 
A favorite reflection of Stevenson's, occurring in nearly 
all his serious essays. 

Page 11. Shelley speaks of the sea as "hungering for 
calm." This passage occurs in the poem Prometheus Un- 
bound, Act III, end of Scene 2. 

"Behold the Nereids under the green sea— 
Their wavering limbs borne on the wind like 

stream, 
Their white arms lifted o'er their streaming hair, 
With garlands pied and starry sea-flower crowns,— 
Hastening to grace their mighty Sister's joy. 
It is the unpastured sea hungering for calm." 

Page 12. Whin-pods. "Whin" is from the Welsh gwyn, 
meaning "weed." Whin is gorse or furze, and the sound 
Stevenson alludes to is frequently heard in Scotland. 

Page 12. "Mon coeur est un luth suspendu." These 
beautiful words are from the poet Beranger C1780-1S57). 
It is probable that Stevenson found them first not in the 



NOTES 19 

original, but in reading the tales of Poe, for the "two 
lines of French verse" that "haunted" Stevenson are 
quoted by Poe at the beginning of one of his most famous 
pieces, The Fall of the House of Usher, 'where, however, 
the third, and not the first person is used: — 

"Son coeur est un luth suspendu ; 
Sitot qu 'on le touche il resonne." 

Page 12. ^^Out of the strong came forth sweetness/' 
Alluding to the riddle propounded by Samson. See the 
book of Judges, Chapter XIV. 



II 



AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 



" BoswELL ! We grow weary when idle. 

"Johnson: That is, sir, because others being busy, we 
want company; but if we were idle, there would be no 
growing weary; we should all entertain one another." 



JUST now, when every one is bound, under pain 
of a decree in absence convicting them of lese- 
respectability, to enter on some lucrative profession, 
and labour therein with something not far short of 
enthusiasm, a cry from the opposite party who are 
content when they have enough, and like to look on 
and enjoy in the meanwhile, savours a little of 
bravado and gasconade. And yet this should not be. 
Idleness so called, which does not consist in doing 
nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognised 
in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling class, has 
as good a right to state its position as industry itself. 
It is admitted that the presence of people who refuse 
to enter in the great handicap race for sixpenny 
pieces, is at once an insult and a disenchantment for 
those who do. A fine fellow (as we see so many) 
takes his determination, votes for the sixpences, and 
in the emphatic Americanism, "goes for" them. 



22 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

And while such an one is ploughing distressfully up 
the road, it is not hard to understand his resentment, 
when he perceives cool persons in the meadows by 
the wayside, lying with a handkerchief over their 
ears and a glass at their elbow. Alexander is touched 
in a very delicate place by the disregard of Diogenes. 
AVhere was the glory of having taken Rome for these 
tumultuous barbarians, who poured into the Senate 
house, and found the Fathers sitting silent and 
unmoved by their success? It is a sore thing to 
have laboured along and scaled the arduous hilltops, 
and when all is done, find humanity indifferent to 
your achievement. Hence physicists condemn the 
unphysical ; financiers have only a superficial tolera- 
tion for those who know little of stocks; literary 
persons despise the unlettered; and people of all- 
pursuits combine to disparage those who have none. 

But though this is one difficulty of the subject, it 
is not the greatest. You could not be put in prison 
for speaking against industry, but you can be sent 
to Coventry for speaking like a fool. The greatest 
difficulty with most subjects is to do them well; 
therefore, please to remember this is an apology. It 
is certain that much may be judiciously argued in 
favour of diligence; only there is something to be 
said against it, and that is what, on the present 
occasion, I have to say. To state one argument is 
not necessarily to be deaf to all others, and that a 
man has written a book of travels in Montenegro, 
is no reason why he should never have been to 
Richmond. 

It is surely beyond a doubt that people should be 
a good deal idle in youth. For though here and 
there a Lord Macaulay may escape from school 



AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 23 

honours with all his wits about him, most boys pay 
so dear for their medals that they never after- 
wards have a shot in their locker, and begin the 
world bankrupt. And the same holds true during 
all the time a lad is educating himself, or suffering 
others to educate him. It must have been a very 
foolish old gentleman who addressed Johnson at 
Oxford in these words : ' ' Young man, ply your book 
diligently now, and acquire a stock of knowledge; 
for when years come upon you, you will find that 
poring upon books will be but an irksome task." 
The old gentleman seems to have been unaware that 
many other things besides reading grow irksome, 
and not a few become impossible, by the time a 
man has to use spectacles and cannot walk without 
a stick. Books are good enough in their own way, 
but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life. 
It seems a pity to sit, like the Lady of Shalott, peer- 
ing into a mirror, with your back turned on all the 
bustle and glamour of reality. And if a man 
reads very hard, as the old anecdote reminds us, he 
will have little time for thoughts. 

If you look back on your own education, I am 
sure it will not be the full, vivid, instructive hours 
of truantry that you regret ; you would rather cancel 
some lack-lustre periods between sleep and waking 
in the class. For my own part, I have attended a 
good many lectures in my time. I still remember 
that the spinning of a top is a case of Kinetic Sta- 
bility. I still remember that Emphyteusis is not a 
disease, nor Stillicide a crime. But though I would 
not willingly part with such scraps of science, I do 
not set the same store by them as by certain other 
odds and ends that I came by in the open street 



2^ STEVENSOK'S ESSAYS 

while I was playing truant. This is not the moment 
to dilate on that mighty place of education, which 
was the favourite school of Dickens and of Balzac, 
and turns out yearly many inglorious masters in 
the Science of the Aspects of Life. Suffice it to say 
this: if a lad does not learn in the streets, it is 
because he has no faculty of learning. Nor is the 
truant always in the streets, for if he prefers, he 
may go out by the gardened suburbs into the coun- 
try. He may pitch on some tuft of lilacs over a 
burn, and smoke innumerable pipes to the tune of 
the water on the stones. A bird will sing in the 
thicket. And there he ma^ fall into a vein of kindly 
thought, and see things in a new perspective. Why, 
if this be not education, what is 1 We may conceive 
Mr. Worldly Wiseman accosting such an one, and 
the conversation that should thereupon ensue: — 

' ' How, now, young fellow, what dost thou here 1 ' ' 

''Truly, sir, I take mine ease." 

"Is not this the hour of the class? and should 'st 
thou not be plying thy Book with diligence, to the 
end thou may est obtain knowledge ? ' ' 

''Nay, but thus also I follow after Learning, by 
your leave." 

"Learning, quotha! After what fashion, I pray 
thee ? Is it mathematics ? ' ' 

"No, to be sure." 

"Is it metaphysics?" 

"Nor that." 

"Is it some language?" 

"Nay, it is no language." 

"Is it a trade?" 

"Nor a trade neither." 

"Why, then, what is 't?" 



AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 25 

'* Indeed, sir, as a time may soon come for me to 
go upon Pilgrimage, I am desirous to note what is 
commonly done by persons in my case, and where 
are the ugliest Sloughs and Thickets on the Road; 
as also, what manner of Staff is of the best service. 
Moreover, I lie here, by this water, to learn by 
root-of-heart a lesson which my master teaches me 
to call Peace, or Contentment. ' ' 

Hereupon, Mr. Worldly Wiseman was much com- 
moved with passion, and shaking his cane with a 
very threatful countenance, broke forth upon this 
wise: '' Learning, quotha!" said he; "I would have 
all such rogues scourged by the Hangman ! ' ' 

And so he would go his way, ruffling out his 
cravat with a crackle of starch, like a turkey when 
it spread its feathers. 

Now this, of Mr. Wiseman, is the common opinion. 
A fact is not called a fact, but a piece of gossip, if 
it does not fall into one of your scholastic categories. 
An inquiry must be in some acknowledged direction, 
with a name to go by; or else you are not inquiring 
at all, only lounging; and the workhouse is too 
good for you. It is supposed that all knowledge is 
at the bottom of a well, or the far end of a telescope. 
Sainte-Beuve, as he grew older, came to regard all 
experience as a single great book, in which to study 
for a few years ere we go hence; and it seemed all 
one to him whether you should read in Chapter xx., 
which is the differential calculus, or in Chapter 
xxxix., which is hearing the band play in the gardens. 
As a matter of fact, an intelligent person, looking 
out of his eyes and hearkening in his ears, with a 
smile on his face all the time, will get more true 
education than many another in a life of heroic 



26 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

vigils. There is certainly some chill and arid knowl- 
edge to be found upon the summits of formal and 
laborious science; but it is all round about you, and 
for the trouble of looking, that you will acquire the 
warm and palpitating facts of life. While others 
are filling their memory with a lumber of words, 
one-half of which they will forget before the week 
be out, your truant may learn some really useful 
art^ to play the fiddle, to know a good cigar, or 
to speak with ease and opportunity to all varieties 
of men. Many who have ''plied their book dili- 
gently," and know all about some one branch or 
another of accepted lore, come out of the study with 
an ancient and owl-like demeanour, and prove dry, 
stockish, and dyspeptic in all the better and brighter 
parts of life. Many make a large fortune, who re- 
main underbred and pathetically stupid to the last. 
And meantime there goes the idler, who began life 
along with them— by your leave, a different picture. 
He has had time to take care of his health and his 
spirits; he has been a great deal in the open air, 
which is the most salutary of all things for both 
body and mind; and if he has never read the great 
Book in very recondite places, he has dipped into 
it and skimmed it over to excellent purpose. Might 
not the student afford some Hebrew roots, and the 
business man some of his half-crowns, for a share 
of the idler's knowledge of life at large, and Art of 
Living? Nay, and the idler has another and more 
important quality than these. I mean his wisdom. 
He who has much looked on at the childish satis- 
faction of other people in their hobbies, will regard 
his own with only a very ironical indulgence. He 
will not be heard among the dogmatists. He will 



AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 27 

have a great and cool allowance for all sorts of people 
and opinions. If he finds no out-of-the-way truths, 
he will identify himself with no very burning false- 
hood. , His way took him along a by-road, not much 
frequented, but very even and pleasant, which is 
called Commonplace Lane, and leads to the Belve- 
dere of Commonsense. Thence he shall command 
an agreeable, if no very noble prospect; and while 
others behold the East and West, the Devil and the 
Sunrise, he will be contentedly aware of a sort of 
morning hour upon all sublunary things, with an 
army of shadows running speedily and in many 
different directions into the great daylight of Eter- 
nity. The shadows and the generations, the shrill 
doctors and the plangent wars, go by into ultimate 
silence and emptiness; but underneath all this, a 
man may see, out of the Belvedere windows, much 
green and peaceful landscape ; many firelit parlours ; 
good people laughing, drinking, and making love 
as they did before the Flood or the French Revolu- 
tion; and the old shepherd telling his tale under 
the hawthorn. 

Extreme busyness, whether at school or college, 
kirk or market, is a symptom of deficient vitality; 
and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite 
and a strong sense of personal identity. There is a 
sort of dead-alive, hackneyed people about, who are 
scarcely conscious of living except in the exercise 
of some conventional occupation. Bring these fel- 
lows into the country, or set them aboard ship, and 
you will s^ee how they pine for their desk or their 
study. They have no curiosity; they cannot give 
themselves over to random provocations ; they do 
not take pleasure in the exercise of their faculties 



28 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

for its own sake; and unless Necessity lays about 
them with a stick, they will even stand still. It is 
no good speaking to such folk: they cannot be idle, 
their nature is not generous enough; and they pass 
those hours in a sort of coma, which are not dedi- 
cated to furious moiling in the gold-mill. When 
they do not require to go to the office, when they 
are not hungry and have no mind to drink, the whole 
breathing Avorld is a blank to them. If they have to 
wait an hour or so for a train, they fall into a stupid 
trance with their eyes open. To see them, you would 
suppose there was nothing to look at and no one to 
speak with ; you would imagine they were paralysed 
or alienated; and yet very possibly they are hard 
workers in their own way, and have good eyesight for 
a flaw in a deed or a turn of the market. They have 
been to school and college, but all the time they had 
their eye on the medal ; they have gone about in the 
world and mixed with clever people, but all the time 
they were thinking of their own affairs. As if a 
man's soul were not too small to begin with, they 
have dwarfed and narrowed theirs by a life of all 
work and no play ; until here they are at forty, with 
a listless attention, a mind vacant of all material of 
amusement, and not one thought to rub against an- 
other, while they wait for the train. Before he was 
breeched, he might have clambered on the boxes; 
when he was twenty, he would have stared at the 
girls; but now the pipe is smoked out, the snuffbox 
empty, and my gentleman sits bolt upright upon a 
bench, with lamentable eyes. This does not appeal 
to me as being Success in Life. 

But it is not only the person himself who suffers 
from his busy habits, but his wife and children, his 



AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 29 

friends and relations, and down to the very people 
he sits with in a railway carriage or an omnibus. 
Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, 
is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many 
other things. And it is not by any means certain 
that a man's business is the most important thing 
he has to do. To an impartial estimate it will seem 
clear that many of the wisest, most virtuous, and 
most beneficent parts that are to be played upon the 
Theatre of Life are filled by gratuitous performers, 
and pass, among the world at large, as phases of 
idleness. For in that Theatre not only the walking 
gentlemen, singing chambermaids, and diligent fid- 
dlers in the orchestra, but those who look on and 
clap their hands from the benches, do really play 
a part and fulfil important offices towarcjs the general 
result. You are no doubt very dependent on the 
care of your lawyer and stockbroker, of the guards 
and signalmen who convey you rapidly from place 
to place, and the policemen who walk the streets 
for your protection; but is there not a thought of 
gratitude in your heart for certain other benefactors 
who set you smiling when they fall in your way, 
or season your dinner with good company? Colonel 
Newcome helped to lose his friend's money; Fred 
Bayham had an ugly trick of borrowing shirts ; and 
yet they were better people to fall among than I\Ir. 
Barnes. And though Falstaff was neither sober 
nor very honest, I think I could name one or two 
long-faced Barabbases whom the world could better 
have done without. Hazlitt mentions that he was 
more sensible of obligation to Northcote, who had 
never done him anything he could call a service, 
than to his whole circle of ostentatious friends; for 



30 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

he thought a good companion emphatically the great- 
est benefactor. I know there are people in the world 
who cannot feel grateful unless the favour has been 
done them at the cost of pain and difficulty. But 
this is a churlish disposition. A man may send you 
six sheets of letter-paper covered with the most enter- 
taining gossip, or you may pass half an hour pleas- 
antly, perhaps profitably, over an article of his; 
do you think the service would be greater, if he 
had made the manuscript in his heart's blood, like a 
compact with the devill Do you really fancy you 
should be more beholden to your correspondent, if 
he had been damning you all the while for your 
importunity? Pleasures are more beneficial than 
duties because, like the quality of mercy, they are 
not strained, and they are twice blest. There must 
always be two to a kiss, and there maj^ be a score 
in a jest; but wherever there is an element of sac- 
rifice, the favour is conferred with pain, and, among 
generous people, received with confusion. There 
is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being 
happy. By being happy, we sow anonymous benefits 
upon the world, w^hich remain unknown even to 
ourselves, or when they are disclosed, surprise nobody 
so much as the benefactor. The other day, a ragged, 
barefoot boy ran down the street after a marble, 
with so jolly an air that he set every one he passed 
into a good humour; one of these persons, who had 
been delivered from more than usually black 
thoughts, stopped the little fellow and gave him some 
money with this remark: "You see what sometimes 
comes of looking pleased." If he had looked pleased 
before, he had now to look both pleased and mystified. 
For my part, I justify this encouragement of smiling 



AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 31 

rather than tearful chiklren; I do not wish to pay 
for tears anywhere but upon the stage; but I am 
prepared to deal largely in the opposite commodity. 
A happy man or woman is a better thing to find than 
a five-pound note. He or she is a radiating focus of 
good-will ; and their entrance into a room is as though 
another candle had been lighted. We need not care 
whether they could prove the forty-seventh proposi- 
tion ; they do a better thing than that, they practically 
demonstrate the great Theorum of the liveableness of 
Life. Consequently, if a person cannot be happy 
without remaining idle, idle he should remain. It is a 
revolutionary precept ; but thanks to hunger and the 
workhouse, one not easily to be abused ; and within 
practical limits, it is one of the most incontestable 
truths iij the whole Body of Morality. Look at one 
of your industrious fellows for a moment, I beseech 
you. He sows hurry and reaps indigestion ; he puts 
a vast deal of activity out to interest, and receives 
a large measure of nervous derangement in return. 
Either he absents himself entirely from all fellow- 
ship, and lives a recluse in a garret, with carpet 
slippers and a leaden inkpot; or he comes among 
people swiftly and bitterly, in a contraction of his 
whole nervous system, to discharge some temper be- 
fore he returns to work. I do not care how much 
or how well he works, this fellow is an evil feature 
in other people's lives. They would be happier if 
he were dead. They could easier do without his 
services in the Circumlocution Office, than they can 
tolerate his fractious spirits. He poisons life at the 
well-head. It is better to be beggared out of hand 
by a scapegrace nephew, than daily hag-ridden by 
a peevish uncle. 



32 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

And what, in God's name, is all this pother about? 
For what cause do they embitter their own and other 
people's lives? That a man should publish three 
or thirty articles a year, that he should finish or not 
finish his great allegorical picture, are questions of 
little interest to the world. The ranks of life are 
full; and although a thousand fall, there are always 
some to go into the breach. When they told Joan 
of Arc she should be at home minding women's 
work, she answered there were plenty to spin and 
wash. And so, even with your own rare gifts! 
When nature is "so careless of the single life, ' ' why 
should we coddle ourselves into the fancy that our 
own is of exceptional importance? Suppose Shake- 
speare had been knocked on the head some dark night 
in Sir Thomas Lucy's preserves, the world would 
have wagged on better or worse, the pitcher gone to 
the well, the scythe to the corn, and the student to 
his book; and no one been any the wiser of the loss. 
There are not many works extant, if you look the 
alternative all over, which are worth the price of a 
pound of tobacco to a man of limited means. This 
is a sobering reflection for the proudest of our 
earthly vanities. Even a tobacconist may, upon con- 
sideration, find no great cause for personal vainglory 
in the phrase; for although tobacco is an admirable 
sedative, the qualities necessary for retailing it are 
neither rare nor precious in themselves. Alas and 
alas! you may take it how you will, but the services 
of no single individual are indispensable. Atlas 
was just a gentleman with a protracted nightmare ! 
And yet you see merchants who go and labour them- 
selves into a great fortune and thence into bank- 
ruptcy court ; scribblers who keep scribbling at little 



AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 33 

articles until their temper is a cross to all who come 
about them, as though Pharaoh should set the Israel- 
ites to make a pin instead of a pyramid; and fine 
young men who work themselves into a decline, and 
are driven off in a hearse with white plumes upon it. 
AVould you not suppose these persons had been whis- 
pered, by the Master of the Ceremonies, the promise 
of some momentous destiny ? and that this lukewarm 
bullet on which they play their farces was the bull's- 
eye and centrepoint of all the universe? And yet 
it is not so. The ends for which they give away 
their priceless youth, for all they know, may be 
chimerical or hurtful ; the glory and riches they ex- 
pect may never come, or may find them indifferent ; 
and they and the world they inhabit are so incon- 
siderable that the mind freezes at the thought. 



NOTES 



THIS essay was first printed in the Cornhill Magazine, 
for July 1877, Vol. XXXVI, pp. 80-86. It was next 
published in the volume, Virginibus Puerisque, in 1881. 
Although this book contains some of the most admirable 
specimens of Stevenson's style, it did not have a large sale, 
and it was not until 1887 that another edition appeared. 
The editor of the Cornhill Magazine from 1871 to 1882 
was Leslie Stephen (1832-1904), whose kindness and 
encouragement to the new writer were of the utmost 
importance at this critical time. That so grave and serious 
a critic as Leslie Stephen should have taken such delight 
in a jeu d'esprit like Idlers, is proof, if any were needed, 
for the breadth of his literary outlook. Stevenson had 
been at work on this article a year before its appearance, 
which shows that his Apology for Idlers demanded from 
him anything but idling. As Graham Balfour says, in his 
Life of Stevenson, I, 122, "Except before his own con- 
science, there was hardly any time when the author of the 
Apology for Idlers ever really neglected the tasks of his 
true vocation." In July 1876 he wrote to Mrs. Sitwell, "A 
paper called *A Defence of Idlers' (which is really a 
defence of R. L. S.) is in a good way." A year later, 
after the publication of the article, he wrote (in August 
1877) to Sidney Colvin, "Stephen has written to me 
apropos of 'Idlers,' that something more in that vein 
would be agreeable to his views. From Stephen I count 
that a devil of a lot." It is noteworthy that this charming 
essay had been refused by Macmillan's Magazine before 
Stephen accepted it for the Cornhill. {Life, I, 180). 



NOTES 35 

Page 21. The conversation between Boswell and John- 
son, quoted at the beginning of the essay, occurred on 
the 26 October 1769, at the famous Mitre Tavern. In 
Stevenson's quotation, the word "all" should be inserted 
after the word "were" to correspond with the original text, 
and to make sense. Johnson, though constitutionally lazy, 
was no defender of Idlers, and there is a sly humour in 
Stevenson's appealing to him as authority. Boswell says 
in his Life, under date of 1780, "He would allow no 
settled indulgence of idleness upon principle, and always 
repelled every attempt to urge excuses for it. A friend 
one day suggested, that it was not wholesome to study 
soon after dinner. Johnson: 'Ah, sir, don't give way 
to such a fancy. At one time of my life I had taken it 
into my head that it was not wholesome to study between 
breakfast and dinner.' " 

Page 21. Lese-respectahility. From the French verb 
leser, to hurt, to injure. The most common employment 
of this verb is in the phrase ''lese-majeste;' high treason. 
Stevenson's mood here is like that of Lowell, when he 
said regretfully, speaking of the eighteenth century, 
"Responsibility for the universe had not then been in- 
vented." (Essay on Gray.) 

Page 21. Gasconade. Boasting. The inhabitants of 
Gascony (Gascogne) a province in the south-west of 
France, are proverbial not only for their impetuosity and 
courage, but for their willingness to brag of the possession 
of these qualities. Excellent examples of the typical 
Gascon in literature are D'Artagnan in Dumas's Trots 
Mousquet aires (1844) and Cyrano in Rostand's splendid 
drama, Cyrano de Bergerac (1897). 

Page 21. Jn the emphatic Americanism,, '^goes for" 
them,. When Stevenson wrote this (1876-77), he had not 
yet been in America. Two years later, in 1879, when he 
made the journey across the plains, he had many oppor- 
tunities to record Americanisms far more emphatic than 
the harmless phrase quoted here, which can hardly be. 



36 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

called an Americanism. Murray's New English Dictionary 
gives excellent English examples of this particular sense 
of "go for" in the years 1641, 1790, 1864, and 1882 ! 

Page 22. Alexander is touched in a very delicate place. 
Alluding to the famous interview between the young 
Alexander and the old Diogenes, which took place at 
Corinth about 330 B. C. Alexander asked Diogenes in 
what way he could be of service to him, and the philos- 
opher replied gruffly, "By standing out of my sunshine." 
As a young man Diogenes had been given to all excesses 
of dissipation; but he later went to the opposite extreme 
of asceticism, being one of the earliest and most striking 
illustrations of "plain living and high thinking." The 
debauchery of his youth and the privation and exposure 
of his old age did not deeply affect his hardy constitution, 
for he is said to have lived to the age of ninety. In the 
charming play by the Elizabethan, John Lyly, A moste 
excellent e Comedie of Alexander, Campaspe, and Diogenes 
(1584), the conversations between the man who has con- 
quered the world and the man who has overcome the 
world are highly entertaining. 

Page 22. Where was the glory of having taken Borne. 
This refers to the invasion by the Gauls about the year 
389 B. C. A good account is given in T. Arnold's History 
of Rome I, pp. 534 et seq. 

Page 22. Sent to Coventry. The origin of this proverb, 
which means of course, "to ostracise," probably dates 
back to 1647, when, according to Clarendon's History of 
the Great Rebellion, VI, par. 83, Royalist prisoners were 
sent to the parliamentary stronghold of Coventry, in 
Warwickshire. 

Page 22. Montenegro . . . Richmond. Montenegro 
is one of the smallest principalities in the world, about 
3,550 square miles. It is in the Balkan peninsula, to the 
east of the lower Adriatic, between Austro-Hungary and 
Turkey. When Stevenson was writing this essay, 1876-77, 
Montenegro was the subject of much discussion, owing to 



NOTES 37 

the part she took in the Russo-Turkish war. The year 
after this article was published (1878) Montenegro reached 
the coast of the Adriatic for the first time, and now has 
two tiny seaports. Tennyson celebrated the hardy virtues 
of the inhabitants in his sonnet Montenegro, written in 
1877. 

"0 smallest among peoples! rough rock-throne 
Of Freedom ! warriors beating back the swarm 
Of Turkish Islam for five hundred years." 

Richmond is on the river Thames, close to the city of 
London. 

Page 22. Lord Macaulay may escape from school 
honours. Stevenson here alludes to the oft-heard state- 
ment that the men who succeed in after life have generally 
been near the foot of their classes at school and college. 
It is impossible to prove either the falsity or truth of so 
general a remark, but it is easier to point out men who 
have been successful both at school and in life, than to 
find sufficient evidence that school and college prizes 
prevent further triumphs. Macaulay, who is noted by 
Stevenson as an exception, was precocious enough to 
arouse the fears rather than the hopes of his friends. 
When he was four years old, he hurt his finger, and a 
lady inquiring politely as to whether the injured member 
was better, the infant replied gravely, "Thank you, Madam, 
the agony is abated." 

Page 23. The Lady of Shalott. See Tennyson's beauti- 
ful poem (1833). 

"And moving thro* a mirror clear 
That hangs before her all the year, 
Shadows of the world appear." 

Page 23. Some lack-lwstre periods between sleep and 
leaking. Cf. King Lear, Act I, Sc. 2, vs. 15. "Got 
'tween asleep and wake." 



38, STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

Page 23. Kinetic Stability. . , . Emphyteusis. . . . 
Stillicide. For Kinetic Stability, see any modern text- 
book on Physics. Emphyteusis is the legal renting of 
ground; Stillicide, a continual dropping of water, as 
from the eaves of a house. These words. Emphyteusis and 
Stillicide, are terms in Roman Law. Stevenson is of 
course making fun of the required studies of Physics and 
Roman Law, and of their lack of practical value to him 
in his chosen career. 

Page 24. The favourite school of Dickens and of Balzac. 
The great English novelist Dickens (1812-1870) and his 
greater French contemporary Balzac (1799-1850), show 
in their works that their chief school was Life. 

Page 24. Mr. Worldly Wiseman. The character in 
Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (1678), who meets Christian 
soon after his setting out from the City of Destruction. 
Pilgrim's Progress was a favorite book of Stevenson's; he 
alludes to it frequently in his essays. See also his own 
article Bagster's Pilgrim's Progress, first published in the 
Magazine of Art in February 1882. This essay is well 
worth reading, and the copies of the pictures which he 
includes are extremely diverting. 

Page 25. Sainte-Beuve. The French writer Sainte- 
Beuve (1804-1869) is usually regarded today as the 
greatest literary critic who ever lived. His constant 
change of convictions enabled him to see life from all sides. 

Page 27. Belvedere of Commonsense. Belvedere is an 
Italian word, which referred originally to a place of 
observation on the top of a house, from which one might 
enjoy an extensive prospect. A portion of the Vatican 
in Rome is called the Belvedere, thus lending this name 
to the famous statue of Apollo, which stands there. On 
the continent, anything like a summer-house is often 
called a Belvedere. One of the most interesting localities 
which bears this name is the Belvedere just outside of 
Weimar, in Germany, where Goethe used to act in his own 
dramas in the open air theatre. 



NOTES 39 

Page 27. The plangent wars. Plangent is from the 
Latin plango, to strike, to beat. Stevenson's use of the 
word is rather unusual in English. 

Page 27. The old shepherd telling his tale.. See Milton, 
L 'Allegro: — 

"And every shepherd tells his tale 
Under the hawthorn in the dale." 

"Tells his tale" means of course "counts his sheep," 
not "tells a story." The old use of the word "tell" for 
"count" survives to-day in the word "teller" in a parli- 
amentary assemblage, or in a bank. 

Page 29. Colonel Newcome. . . Fred Bayham . . . Mr. 
Barnes . . .Falstaff . . . Barabhases . . . Hazlitt . . . North- 
cote. Colonel Newcome, the great character in Thackeray's 
The Newcomes (1854). Fred Bayham and Barnes Newcome 
are persons in the same story. One of the best essays on 
Falstaff is the one printed in the first series of Mr. 
Augustine BirrelFs Obiter Dicta (1884). This essay would 
have pleased Thackeray. One of the finest epitaphs in 
literature is that pronounced over the supposedly dead body 
of Falstaff by Prince Hal— "I could have better spared 
a better man." {King Henry IV, Part I, Act V, Sc. 4.) 
Bar abb as was the robber who was released at the time of 
the trial of Christ. ... William Hazlitt (1778-1830), the 
well-known essayist, published in 1830 the Conversations 
of James Northcote (1746-1831). Northcote was an artist 
and writer, who had been an assistant in the studio of Sir 
Joshua Reynolds. Stevenson projected a Life of Hazlitt. 
but later abandoned the undertaking. {Life, I, 230.) 

Page 30. The quality of mercy. See Portia's wonder- 
ful speech in the Merchant of Venice, Act IV, Scene I. 

Page 32. Joan of Are. The famous inspired French 
peasant girl, who led the armies of her king to victory, 
and who was burned at Rouen in 1431. She was variously 
regarded as a harlot and a saint. In Shakspere's histori- 
cal plays, she is repi'esentcd in the basest manner, from 



40 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

conventional motives of English patriotism. Voltaire's 
scandalous work, La Pucelle, and Schiller's noble Jungfrau 
von Orleans make an instructive contrast. She has been 
the subject of many dramas and works of poetry and 
fiction. Her latest prominent admirer is Mark Twain, 
whose historical romance Joan of Arc is one of the most 
carefully written, though not one of the most character- 
istic of his books. 

Page 32. ^^So careless of the single life." See Tenny- 
son's In Memoriam, LV, where the poet discusses the 
pessimism caused by regarding the apparent indifference 
of nature to the happiness of the individual. 

"Are God and Nature then at strife, 
That Nature lends such evil dreams? 
So careful of the type she seems, 
So careless of the single life." 

Page 23. Shakespeare . . . Sir Thomas Lucy. The 
familiar tradition that Shakspere as a boy Avas a poacher 
on the preserves of his aristocratic neighbor, Sir Thomas 
Lucy. See Halliwell-Phillipps's Outlines of the Life of 
Shakespeare. In 1879, at the first performance of As 
You Like It at the Stratford Memorial Theatre, 
the deer brought on the stage in Act IV, Scene 2, had been 
shot that very morning by H. S. Lucy, Esq., of Charlecote 
Park, a descendant of the owner of the herd traditionally 
attacked by the future dramatist. 

Page 32. Atlas. In mythology, the hader of the Titans, 
who fought the Gods, and was condemned by Zeus to 
cany the weight of the vault of heaven on his head and 
hands. In the sixteenth century the name Atlas was given 
to a collection of maps by Mercator, probably because a 
picture of Atlas had been commonly placed on the title- 
pages of geographical works. 

Page 33. Pharoah . . . Pyramid. For PharoaWs ex- 
periences with the Israelites, see the book of Exodus. 



NOTES 41 

Pharaoh was merely the name given by the children of 
Israel to the rulers of Egypt : cf . Caesar, Kaiser, etc. . . . 
The Egyptian pyramids were regarded as one of the 
seven wonders of ancient times, the great pyramid weigh- 
ing over six million tons. The pyramids were used for 
the tombs of monarchs. 

Page 33. Young men who work themselves into a 
decline. Compare the tone of the close of this essay with 
that of the conclusion of jEs Triplex. Stevenson him- 
self died in the midst of the most arduous work possible— 
the making of a literary masterpiece. 



Ill 



^S TRIPLEX 



THE changes wrought by death are in themselves 
so sharp and final, and so terrible and melan- 
choly in their consequences, that the thing stands 
oJone in man's experience, and has no parallel upon 
3arth. It outdoes all other accidents because it is 
the last of them. Sometimes it leaps suddenly upon 
its victims, like a Thug ; sometimes it lays a regular 
siege and creeps upon their citadel during a score of 
years. And when the business is done, there is sore 
havoc made in other people 's lives, and a pin knocked 
out by which many subsidiary friendships hung to- 
gether. There are empty chairs, solitary walks, and 
single beds at night. Again in taking away our 
friends, death does not take them away utterly, but 
leaves behind a mocking, tragical, and soon intoler- 
able residue, which must be hurriedly concealed. 
Hence a whole chapter of sights and customs striking 
to the mind, from the pyramids of Egypt to the 
gibbets and dule trees of mediaeval Europe. The 
poorest persons have a bit of pageant going towards 
the tomb ; memorial stones are set up over the least 
memorable; and, in order to preserve some show of 
respect for what remains of our old loves and friend- 
ships, we must accompany it with much grimly 



44 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

ludicrous ceremonial, and the hired undertaker 
parades before the door. All this, and much more 
of the same sort, accompanied by the eloquence of 
poets, has gone a great way to put humanity in 
error; nay, in many philosophies the error has been 
embodied and laid down with every circumstance of 
logic ; although in real life the bustle and swiftness, 
in leaving people little time to think, have not left 
them time enough to go dangerously wrong in prac- 
tice. 

As a matter of fact, although few things are spoken 
of with more fearful whisperings than this prospect 
of death, few have less influence on conduct under 
healthy circumstances. We have all heard of cities 
in South America built upon the side of fiery moun- 
tains, and how, even in this tremendous neighbour- 
hood, the inhabitants are not a jot more impressed 
by the solemnity of mortal conditions than if they 
were delving gardens in the greenest corner of Eng- 
land. There are serenades and suppers and much 
gallantry among the myrtles overhead; and mean- 
while the foundation shudders underfoot, the bowels 
of the mountain growl, and at any moment living 
ruin may leap sky-high into the moonlight, and 
tumble man and his merry-making in the dust. In 
the eyes of very young people, and very dull old 
ones, there is something indescribably reckless and 
desperate in such a picture. It seems not credible 
that respectable married people, with umbrellas, 
should find appetite for a bit of supper within quite 
a long distance of a fiery mountain; ordinary life 
begins to smell of high-handed debauch when it is 
carried on so close to a catastrophe : and even cheese 
and salad, it seems, could hardly bo relished in such 



^S TEIPLEX 45 

circumstances without something like a defiance of 
the Creator. It should be a place for nobody xjut 
hermits dwelling in prayer and maceration, or mere 
born-devils drowning care in a perpetual carouse. 

And yet, when one comes to think upon it calmly, 
the situation of these South American citizens forms 
only a very pale figure for the state of ordinary 
mankind. This world itself, travelling blindly and 
swiftly in overcrowded space, among a million other 
worlds travelling blindly and swiftly in contrary 
directions, may very well come by a knock that would 
set it into explosion like a penny squib. And what, 
pathologically looked at, is the human body with 
all its organs, but a mere bagful of petards? The 
least of these is as dangerous to the whole economy 
as the ship 's powder-magazine to the ship ; and with 
every breath we breathe, and every meal we eat, we 
are putting one or more of them in peril. If we 
clung as devotedly as some philosophers pretend we 
do to the abstract idea of life, or were half as fright- 
ened as they make out we are, for the subversive 
accident that ends it all, the trumpets might sound 
by the hour and no one would follow them into 
battle— the blue-peter might fly at the truck, but 
who would climb into a sea-going ship? Think (if 
these philosophers were right) with what a prepa- 
ration of spirit we should affront the daily peril of 
the dinner-table: a deadlier spot than any battle- 
field in history, where the far greater proportion of 
our ancestors have miserably left their bones ! What 
woman would ever be lured into marriage, so much 
more dangerous than the wildest sea? And what 
would it be to grow old? For, after a certain dis- 
tance, every step we take in life we find the ice grow- 



46 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

\ng thinner below our feet, and all around us and 
behind us we see our contemporaries going through. 
By the time a man gets well into the seventies, his 
continued existence is a mere miracle ; and when he 
lays his old bones in bed for the night, there is an 
overwhelming probability that he will never see the 
day. Do the old men mind it, as a matter of fact? 
Why, no. They were never merrier ; they have their 
grog at night, and tell the raciest stories ; they hear 
of the death of people about their own age, or even 
younger, not as if it was a grisly warning, but with 
a simple childlike pleasure at having outlived some- 
one else; and when a draught might puff them out 
like a fluttering candle, or a bit of a stumble shatter 
them like so much glass, their old hearts keep sound 
and unaffrighted, and they go on, bubbling with 
laughter, through years of man's age compared to 
which the valley at Balaclava was as safe and peace- 
ful as a village cricket-green on Sunday. It may 
fairly be questioned (if we look to the peril only) 
whether it was a much more daring feat for Curtius 
to plunge into the gulf, than for any old gentleman 
of ninety to doff his clothes and clamber into bed. 

Indeed, it is a memorable subject for consideration, 
with what unconcern and gaiety mankind pricks on 
along the Valley of the Shadow of Death. The whole 
way is one wilderness of snares, and the end of it, 
for those who fear the last pinch, is irrevocable ruin. 
And yet we go spinning through it all, like a party 
for the Derby. Perhaps the reader remembers one 
of the humorous devices of the deified Caligula : how 
he encouraged a vast concourse of holiday-makers on 
to his bridge over Baiae bay ; and when they were in 
the height of their enjoyment, turned loose the Prae- 



^S TRIPLEX 47 

torian guards among the company, and had them 
tossed into the sea. This is no bad miniature of the 
dealings of nature with the transitory race of man. 
Only, what a chequered picnic we have of it, even 
while it lasts! and into what great waters, not to 
be crossed by any swimmer, God's pale Praetorian 
throws us over in the end ! 

We live the time that a match flickers; we pop 
the cork of a ginger-beer bottle, and the earthquake 
swallows us on the instant. Is it not odd, is it not 
incongruous, is it not, in the highest sense of human 
speech, incredible, that we should think so highly 
of the ginger-beer, and regard so little the devouring 
earthquake? The love of Life and the fear of 
Death are two famous phrases that grow harder to 
understand the more we think about them. It is a 
well-known fact that an immense proportion of boat 
accidents would never happen if people held the 
sheet in their hands instead of making it fast; and 
yet, unless it be some martinet of a professional 
mariner or some landsman with shattered nerves, 
every one of God 's creatures makes it fast. A strange 
instance of man's unconcern and brazen boldness in 
the face of death ! 

We confound ourselves with metaphysical phrases, 
which we import into daily talk with noble inappro- 
priateness. We have no idea of what death is, apart 
from its circumstances and some of its consequences 
to others; and although we have some experience of 
living, there is not a man on earth who has flown 
so high into abstraction as to have any practical 
guess at the meaning of the word life. All literature, 
from Job and Omar Khayyam to Thomas Carlyle 
or Walt Whitman, is but an attempt to look upon the 



48 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

human state with such largeness of view as shall 
enable us to rise from the consideration of living to 
the Definition of Life. And our sages give us about 
the best satisfaction in their power when they say 
that it is a vapour, or a show, or made out of the 
same stuff with dreams. Philosophy, in its more 
rigid sense, has been at the same work for ages ; and 
after a myriad bald heads have wagged over the 
problem, and piles of words have been heaped one 
upon another into dry and cloudy volumes without 
end, philosophy has the honour of laying before us, 
with modest pride, her contribution towards the 
subject: that life is a Permanent Possibility of 
Sensation. Truly a fine result! A man may very 
well love beef, or hunting, or a woman; but surely, 
surely, not a Permanent Possibility of Sensation, 
He may be afraid of a precipice, or a dentist, or a 
large enemy w^ith a club, or even an undertaker's 
man; but not certainly of abstract death. We may 
trick with the word life in its dozen senses until 
we are weary of tricking; we may argue in terms 
of all the philosophies on earth, but one fact remains 
true throughout— that we do not love life, in the 
sense that we are greatly preoccupied about its con- 
servation; that we do not, properly speaking, love 
life at all, but living. Into the views of the least 
careful there will enter some degree of providence ; 
no man 's eyes are fixed entirely on the passing hour ; 
but although we have some anticipation of good 
health, good weather, wine, active employment, love, 
and self -approval, the sum of these anticipations does 
not amount to anything like a general view of life's 
possibilities and issues; nor are those who cherish 



^S TRIPLEX 49 

them most vividly, at all the most scrupulous of 
their personal safety. To be deeply interested in 
the accidents of our existence, to enjoy keenly the 
mixed texture of human experience, rather leads a 
man to disregard precautions, and risk his neck 
against a straw. For surely the love of living is 
stronger in an Alpine climber roping over a peril, 
or a hunter riding merrily at a stiff fence, than in 
a creature who lives upon a diet and walks a meas- 
ured distance in the interest of his constitution. 

There is a great deal of very vile nonsense talked 
upon both sides of the matter: tearing divines re- 
ducing life to the dimensions of a mere funeral 
procession, so short as to be hardly decent; and 
melancholy unbelievers yearning for the tomb as 
if it were a world too far away. Both sides must, 
feel a little ashamed of their performances now and 
again when they draw in their chairs to dinner. 
Indeed, a good meal and a bottle of wine is an answer 
to most standard works upon the question. When 
a man 's heart warms to his viands, he forgets a great 
deal of sophistry, and soars into a rosy zone of 
contemplation. Death may be knocking at the door, 
like the Commander's statue; we have something 
else in hand, thank God, and -let him knock. Pass- 
ing bells are ringing all the world over. All the 
world over, and every hour, someone is parting 
company with all his aches and ecstasies. For us 
also the trap is laid. But we are so fond of life 
that we have no leisure to entertain the terror of 
death. It is a honeymoon with us all through, and 
none of the longest. Small blame to us if we give 
our whole hearts to this glowing bride of ours, to 



50 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

the appetites, to honour, to the hungry curiosity of 
the mind, to the pleasure of the eyes in nature, and 
the pride of our own nimble bodies. 

We all of us appreciate the sensations ; but as for 
caring about the Permanence of the Possibility, a 
man's head is generally very bald, and his senses 
very dull, before he comes to that. Whether we 
regard life as a lane leading to a dead wall— a mere 
bag's end, as the French say— or whether we think 
of it as a vestibule or gymnasium, where we wait 
our turn and prepare our faculties for some more 
noble destiny; whether we thunder in a pulpit, or 
pule in little atheistic poetry-books, about its vanity 
and brevity; whether we look justly for years of 
health and vigour, or are about to mount into a 
Bath-chair, as a step towards the hearse ; in each and 
all of these views and situations there is but one 
conclusion possible: that a man should stop his ears 
against paralysing terror, and run the race that is 
set before him with a single mind. No one surely 
could have recoiled with more heartache and terror 
from the thought of death than our respected lexicog- 
rapher; and yet we know how little it affected his 
conduct, how wisely and boldly he walked, and in 
what a fresh and lively vein he spoke of life. Al- 
ready an old man, he ventured on his Highland tour ; 
and his heart, bound with triple brass, did not recoil 
before twenty-seven individual cups of tea. As 
courage and intelligence are the two qualities best 
worth a good man's cultivation, so it is the first 
part of intelligence to recognise our precarious estate 
in life, and the first part of courage to be not at all 
abashed before the fact. A frank and somewhat 
headlong carriage, not looking too anxiously before. 



^S TRIPLEX 51 

not dallying in maudlin regret over the past, stamps 
the man who is well armoured for this world. 

And not only well armoured for himself, but a 
good friend and a good citizen to boot. We do not 
go to cowards for tender dealing; there is nothing 
so cruel as panic ; the man who has least fear for his 
own carcass, has most time to consider others. That 
eminent chemist who took his walks abroad in tin 
shoes, and subsisted wholly upon tepid milk, had 
all his work cut out for him in considerate dealings 
with his own digestion. So soon as prudence has 
begun to grow up in the brain, like a dismal fungus, 
it finds its first expression in a paralysis of generous 
acts. The victim begins to shrink spiritually; he 
develops a fancy for parlours with a regulated tem- 
perature, and takes his morality on the principle 
of tin shoes and tepid milk. The care of one im- 
portant body or soul becomes so engrossing, that 
all the noises of the outer world begin to come thin 
and faint into the parlour with the regulated tem- 
perature ; and the tin shoes go equably forward over 
blood and rain. To be overwise is to ossify; and 
the scruple-monger ends by standing stockstill. Now 
the man who has his heart on his sleeve, and a good 
whirling weathercock of a brain, who reckons his 
life as a thing to be dashingly used and cheerfully 
hazarded, makes a very different acquaintance of 
the world, keeps all his pulses going true and fast, 
and gathers impetus as he runs, until, if he be run- 
ning towards anything better than wildfire, he may 
shoot up and become a constellation in the end. Lord 
look after his health, Lord have a care of his soul, 
says he; and he has at the key of the position, and 
swashes through incongruity and peril towards his 



52 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

aim. Death is on all sides of him with pointed 
batteries, as he is on all sides of all of ns; unfor- 
tunate surprises gird him round; mim-mouthed 
friends and relations hold up their hands in quite 
a little elegiacal synod about his path: and what 
cares he for all this? Being a true lover of living, 
a fellow with something pushing and spontaneous 
in his inside, he must, like any other soldier, in any 
other stirring, deadly warfare, push on at his best 
pace until he touch the goal. "A peerage or West- 
minster Abbey!" cried Nelson in his bright, boyish, 
heroic manner. These are great incentives; not for 
any of these, but for the plain satisfaction of living, 
of being about their business in some sort or other, 
do the brave, serviceable men of every nation tread 
down the nettle danger, and pass flyingly over all 
the stumbling-blocks of prudence. Think of the 
heroism of Johnson, think of that superb indifference 
to mortal limitation that set him upon his dictionary, 
and carried him through triumphantly until the 
end! Who, if he were wisely considerate of things 
at large, would ever embark upon any work much 
more considerable than a halfpenny post card? Who 
would project a serial novel, after Thackeray and 
Dickens had each fallen in mid-course? Who would 
find heart enough to begin to live, if he dallied with 
the consideration of death? 

And, after all, what sorry and pitiful quibbling 
all this is! To forego all the issues of living in a 
parlour with a regulated temperature— as if that 
were not to die a hundred times over, and for ten 
years at a stretch ! As if it were not to die in one 's 
own lifetime, and without even the sad immunities 
of death! As if it were not to die, and yet be the 



^S TRIPLEX 53 

patient spectators of our own pitiable change ! The 
Permanent Possibility is preserved, but the sensa- 
tions carefully held at arm's length, as if one kept 
a photographic plate in a dark chamber. It is better 
In lose health like a spendthrift than to waste it 
like a miser. It is better to live and be done with it, 
than to die daily in the sickroom. By all means 
begin your folio; even if the doctor does not give 
you a year, even if he hesitates about a month, make 
one brave push and see what can be accomplished 
in a week. It is not only in finished undertakings 
that we ought to honour useful labour. A spirit 
goes out of the man who means execution, which 
outlives the most untimely ending. All who have 
meant good work with their whole hearts, have done 
good work, although they may die before they have 
the time to sign it. Every heart that has beat strong 
and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it 
in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind. 
And even if death catch people, like an open pitfall, 
and in mid-career, laying out vast projects, and 
planning monstrous foundations, flushed with hope, 
and their mouths full of boastful language, they 
should be at once tripped up and silenced: is there 
not something brave and spirited in such a termina- 
tion? and does not life go down with a better grace, 
foaming in full body over a precipice, than misera- 
bly straggling to an end in sandy deltas? When the 
Greeks made their fine saying that those whom the 
gods love die young, I cannot help believing they had 
this sort of death also in their eye. For surely, at 
whatever age it overtake the man, this is to die 
young. Death has not been suffered to take so 
much as an illusion from his heart. In the hot-fit 



54 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

of life, a tip-toe on the highest point of being, he 
passes at a bound on to the other side. The noise 
of the mallet and chisel is scarcely quenched, the 
trumpets are hardly done blowing, when, trailing 
with him clouds of glory, this happy-starred, full- 
blooded spirit shoots into the spiritual land. 



NOTES 

THIS essay, which is commonly (and justly) regarded as 
Stevenson's masterpiece of literary composition, was 
first printed in the Cornhill Magazine for April 1878, Vol. 
XXXVII, pp. 432-437. In 1881 it was published in the 
volume Virginihus Puerisque. For the success of this 
volume, as well as for its author's relations with the editor 
of the Cornhill, see our note to An Apology for Idlers. 
It was this article which was selected for reprinting in 
separate form by the American Committee of the Robert 
Louis Stevenson Memorial Fund ; to every subscriber of ten 
dollars or more, was given a copy of this essay, exquisitely 
printed at the De Vinne Press, 1898. Copies of this 
edition are now eagerly sought by book-collectors; five of 
them were taken by the Robert Louis Stevenson Club of 
Yale College, consisting of a few undergraduates of the 
class of 1898, who subscribed fifty dollars to the fund. 

Stevenson's cheerful optimism was constantly shadowed 
by the thought of Death, and in JEs Triplex he gives free 
rein to his fancies on this universal theme. 

Page 43. The title, JEs Triplex, is taken from Horace, 
ees triplex circa pectus, "breast enclosed by triple brass," 
"aBs" used by Horace as a "symbol of indomitable 
courage." —Lewis's Latin Dictionary. 

Page 43. Thug. This word, which sounds to-day so 
slangy, really comes from the Hindoos (Hindustani thaaa, 
deceive). It is the name of a religious order in India, 
ostensibly devoted to the worship of a goddess, but really 
given to murder for the sake of booty. The Englishmen 

55 



56 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

in India called them Thugs, hence the name in its modern 
general sense. 

Page 43. Pyramids . . . dule trees. For pyramids, see 
our note on page 40. . . Dule trees. More properly- 
spelled "dool." A dool was a stake or i^ost used to mark 
boundaries. 

Page 45. The trumpets might sound. "For if the 
trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare him- 
self to the battle?" I Cor. XIV, 8. 

Page 45. The blue-peter might fly at the truck. The 
blue-peter is a term used in the British navy and widely 
elsewhere; it is a blue flag with a white square employed 
often as a signal for sailing. The word is corrupted from 
Blue Repeater, a signal flag. Truck is a very small plat- 
form at the top of a mast. 

Page 46. Party for the Derby. Derby Day, which is 
the occasion of the most famous annual running race for 
horses in the world, takes place in the south of England 
during the week preceding Whitsunday. The race was 
founded by the Earl of Derby in 1780. It is now 
one of the greatest holidays in England, and the 
whole city of London turns out for the event. It is a 
great spectacle to see the crowd going from London and 
returning. The most faithful description of the event, 
the crowds, and the interest excited, may be found in 
George Moore's novel, Esther Waters (1894). 

Page 46. The deified Caligula. Cains Caligula was 
Roman Emperor from 37 to 41 A. D. He was brought up 
among the soldiers, who gave him the name Caligula, 
because he wore the soldier's leather shoe, or half -boot, 
(Latin caliga). Caligula was deified, but that did not 
prevent him from becoming a madman, which seems to 
be the best way to account for his wanton cruelty and 
extraordinary caprices. Baies was a small town on the 
Campanian Coast, ten miles from Naples. It was a 
favorite summer resort of the Roman aristocracy. The 
PrcBtorian Guard was the body-guard of the Roman 



I 



NOTES 57 

emperors. The incident Stevenson speaks of may be 
found in Tacitus. 

Page 46. Balaclava. A little port near Sebastopol, 
in the Crimea. During the Crimean War, on the 25 
October 1854, occurred the cavalry charge of some six 
hundred Englishmen, celebrated by Tennyson's univer- 
sally known poem. The Charge of the Light Brigade. It 
has recently been asserted that the number reported as 
actually killed in this headlong charge referred to the 
horses, not to the men. 

Page 46. Curtius. Referring to the story of the Roman 
youth, Metius Curtius, who in 362 B. C, leaped into a 
chasm in the Forum, in order to save his country. The 
chasm immediately closed over him, and Rome was saved. 
Although the truth of the story has naturally failed to 
survive the investigations of historical critics, its moral 
inspiration has been effective in many historical instances. 

Page 47. Job . . . Walt Whitman. The book of Job 
is usually regarded as the most poetical work in the Bible, 
even exceeding Psalms and Isaiah in its splendid imagi- 
native language and extraordinary figures of speech. For 
a literary study of it, the student is recommended to 
Professor Moulton's edition. Omar Khayyam was a 
Persian poet of mediaeval times, who became known to 
English readers through the beautiful paraphrase of some 
of his stanzas by Edward Fitzgerald, in 1859. If any one 
will take the trouble to compare a literal prose rendering 
of Omar (as in N. H. Dole's variorum edition) with the 
version by Fitzgerald, he will speedily see that the power 
and beauty of the poem is due far more to the skill of "Old 
Fitz" than to the original. Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) was 
perhaps the foremost writer of English prose in the nine- 
teenth century. Although a consummate literary artist, 
he was even more influential as a moral tonic. His 
philosophy and that of Omar represent as wide a 
contrast as could easily be found. Walt Whitman, the 
strange American poet (1819-1892), whose famous Leaves 



58 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

of Grass (1855) excited an uproar in America, and gave 
the author a much more serious reputation in Europe. 
Stevenson's interest in him was genuine, but not partisan, 
and his essay, The Gospel According to Walt Whitman 
{The New Quarterly Magazine, Oct. 1878), is perhaps the 
most judicious appreciation in the English language of 
this singular poet. Job, Omar Khayyam, Carlyle and 
Whitman, taken together, certainly give a curious collection 
of what the Germans call Weltanschauung en. 

Page 48. A vapour, or a show, or made out of the same 
stuff with dreams. For constant comparisons of life with 
a vapour or a show, see Quarles's Emblems (1635), though 
these conventional figures may be found thousands of 
times in general literature. The latter part of the sentence 
refers to the Tempest, Act IV, Scene I. 

"We are such stuff 
As dreams are made on, and our little life 
Is rounded with a sleep." 

Page 48. Permanent Possibility of Sensation. "Matter 
then, may be defined, a Permanent Possibility of Sensation." 
—John Stuart Mill, Examination of Sir William 
Hamilton's Philosophy, Vol. I. Chap. XL 

Page 49. Like the Commander's Statue. In the 
familiar story of Don Juan, where the audacious rake 
accepts the Commander's invitation to supper. For 
treatments of this theme, see Moliere's play Don Juan, or 
Mozart's opera Don Giovanni; see also Bernard Shaw's 
paradoxical play, Man and Superman. . . . We have some- 
thing else in hand, thank God, and let him knock. It is 
possible that Stevenson's words here are an unconscious 
reminiscence of Colley Cibber's letter to the novelist 
Richardson^ This unabashed old profligate celebrated the 
Christmas Day of his eightieth year by writing to the 
apostle of domestic virtue in the following strain: 
"Though Death has been cooling his heels at my door 



NOTES 59 

these three weeks, I have not had time to see him. The 
daily conversation of my friends has kept me so agreeably 
alive, that I have not passed my time better a great while. 
If yo)j have a mind to make one of us, I will order Death 
to com^ another day." 

Page 49. All the world over, and every hour. He might 
truthfully have said, "every second." 

Page 50. A mere hag's end, as the French say. A cul de 
sac. 

Page 50. Our respected lexicographer . . . Highland 
tour . . . triple brass . . . twenty-seven individual cups of 
tea. Dr. Samuel Johnson's Dictionary appeared in 1755. 
For his horror of death, his fondness for tea, and his 
Highland tour with Boswell, see the latter's Life of John- 
son; consult the late Dr. HilFs admirable index in his 
edition of the Life. 

Page 52. Mim-mouthed friends. See J. Wright's Eng- 
lish Dialect Dictionary. "Mim-mouthed" means "affectedly 
prim or proper in speech." 

Page 52. "J. peerage or Westminster Abbey!" Horatio 
Nelson (1758-1805), the most famous admiral in England's 
naval history, who won the great battle of Trafalgar and 
lost his life in the moment of victory. Nelson was as 
ambitious as he was brave, and his cry that Stevenson 
quotes was characteristic. 

Page 52. Tread down the nettle danger. Hotspur's 
words in King Henry IV, Part I, Act II, Sc. 3. "Out 
of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety." 

Page 52. After Thackeray and Dickens had each fallen 
in mid-course f Thackeray and Dickens, dying in 1863 
and in 1870 respectively, left unfinished Denis Duval and 
The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Stevenson himself left 
unfinished what would in all probability have been his 
unquestioned masterpiece. Weir of Hermiston. 

Page 53. All who have meant good work with their 
whole hearts, have done good work. See Browning's 
inspiring poem, Eabbi Ben Ezra, XXIII, XXIV, XXV:— 



60 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

"Not on the vulgar mass 
Called "work," must sentence pass, 

Things done, which took the eye and had the price: 
O'er which, from level stand, 
The low world laid its hand. 

Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice : 

But all, the world's coarse thumb 
And finger failed to plumb, 
So passed in making up the main account; 
All instincts immature. 
All purposes unsure. 
That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's 
amount : 



Thoughts hardly to be packed 
Into a narrow act, 
Fancies that broke through language and escaped; 
All I could never be, 
All, men ignored in me. 
This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped." 

Page 53. Whom the Gods love die young. "Quern di 
diligunt adolescens moritur."— Plautus, Bacchides, Act 
IV, Sc. 7. 

Page 54. Trailing with him clouds of glory. This 
passage, from Wordsworth's Ode on the Intimations of 
Immortality (1807), was a favorite one with Stevenson, 
and he quotes it several times in various essays. 



IV 



TALK AND TALKERS 



" Sir, we had a good talk."— Johnson. 

" As we must account for every idle word, so we must for 
every idle silence.''— Franklin. 



THERE can be no fairer ambition than to excel 
in talk; to be affable, gay, ready, clear and 
welcome ; to have a fact, a thought, or an illustration, 
pat to every subject ; and not only to cheer the flight 
of time among our intimates, but bear our part in 
that great international congress, always sitting, 
where public wrongs are first declared, public errors 
first corrected, and the course of public opinion 
shaped, day by day, a little nearer to the right. No 
measure comes before Parliament but it has been 
long ago prepared by the grand jury of the talkers; 
no book is written that has not been largely com- 
posed by their assistance. Literature in many of 
its branches is no other than the shadow of good 
talk; but the imitation falls far short of the original 
in life, freedom and effect. There are always two 
to a talk, giving and taking, comparmg experience 
and according conclusions. Talk is fluid, tentative, 



62 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

continually ' ' in further search and progress ; ' ' while 
written words remain fixed, become idols even to 
the writer, found wooden dogmatisms, and preserve 
flies of obvious error in the amber of the truth. Last 
and chief, while literature, gagged with linsey- 
woolsey, can only deal with a fraction of the life 
of man, talk goes fancy free and may call a spade 
a spade. It cannot, even if it would, become merely 
aesthetic or merely classical like literature. A jest 
intervenes, the solemn humbug is dissolved in laugh- 
ter, and speech runs forth out of the contemporary 
groove into the open fields of nature, cheery and 
cheering, like schoolboys out of school. And it is 
in talk alone that we can learn our period and our- 
selves. In short, the first duty of a man is to speak ; 
that is his chief business in this world; and talk, 
w^hich is the harmonious speech of two or more, is 
by far the most accessible of pleasures. It costs 
nothing in money; it is all profit; it completes our 
education, founds and fosters our friendships, and 
can be enjoyed at any age and in almost any state 
of health. 

The spice of life is battle ; the friendliest relations 
are still a kind of contest ; and if we would not 
forego all that is valuable in our lot, we must con- 
tinually face some other person, eye to eye, and 
wrestle a fall whether in love or enmity. It is 
still by force of body, or power of character or 
intellect, that we attain to worthy pleasures. Men 
and women contend for each other in the lists of 
love, like rival mesmerists; the active and adroit 
decide their challenges in the sports of the body; 
and the sedentary sit down to chess or conversation. 
All sluggish and pacific pleasures are, to the same 



TALK AND TALKERS 63 

degree, solitary and selfish; and every durable bond 
between human beings is founded in or heightened 
by some element of competition. Now, the relation 
that has the least root in matter is undoubtedly that 
airy one of friendship; and hence, I suppose, it is 
that good talk most commonly arises among friends. 
Talk is, indeed, both the scene and instrument of 
friendship. It is in talk alone that the friends can 
measure strength, and enjoy that amicable counter- 
assertion of personality which is the gauge of rela- 
tions and the sport of life. 

A good talk is not to be had for the asking. 
Humours must first be accorded in a kind of overture 
or prologue ; hour, company and circumstance be 
suited; and then, at a fit juncture, the subject, the 
quarry of two heated minds, spring up like a deer 
out of the wood. Not that the talker ha^ any of the 
hunter's pride, though he has all and more than 
all his ardour. The genuine artist follows the stream 
of conversation as an angler follows the windings 
of a brook, not dallying where he fails to "kill." 
He trusts implicitly to hazard; and he is rewarded 
by continual variety, continual pleasure, and those 
changing prospects of the truth that are the best 
of education. There is nothing in a subject, so 
called, that we should regard it as an idol, or follow 
it beyond the promptings of desire. Indeed, there 
are few subjects; and so far as they are truly talk- 
able, more than the half of them may be reduced 
to three: that I am I, that you are you, and that 
there are other people dimly understood to be not 
quite the same as either. Wherever talk may range, 
it still runs half the time on these eternal lines. 
The theme being set, each plays on himself as on 



64 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

an instrument; asserts and justifies himself; ran- 
sacks his brain for instances and opinions", and 
brings them forth new-minted, to his own surprise 
and the admiration of his adversary. All natural 
talk is a festival of ostentation; and by the laws 
of the game each accepts and fans the vanity of 
the other. It is from that reason that we venture 
to lay ourselves so open, that we dare to be so 
warmly eloquent, and that we swell in each other's 
eyes to such a vast proportion. For talkers, once 
launched, begin to overflow the limits of their ordi- 
nary selves, tower up to the height of their secret 
pretensions, and give themselves out for the heroes, 
brave, pious, musical and wise, that in their most 
shining moments they aspire to be. So they weave 
for themselves with words and for a while inhabit 
a palace of delights, temple at once and theatre, 
where they fill the round of th§ world's dignities, 
and feast with the gods, exulting in Kudos. And 
when the talk is over, each goes his way, still flushed 
with vanity and admiration, still trailing clouds of 
glory; each declines from the height of his ideal 
orgie, not in a moment, but by slow declension. I 
remember, in the entr'acte of an afternoon perform- 
ance, coming forth into the sunshine, in a beautiful 
green, gardened corner of a romantic city; and as 
I sat and smoked, the music moving in my blood, I 
seemed to sit there and evaporate The Flying Dutch- 
man (for it was that I had been hearing) with a 
wonderful sense of life, warmth, well-being and 
pride; and the noises of the city, voices, bells and 
marching feet, fell together in my ears like a sym- 
phonious orchestra. In the same way, the excitement 
of a good talk lives for a long while after in the 



TALK AND TALKERS 65 

blood, the heart still hot within you, the brain still 
simmering, and the physical earth swimming around 
you with the colours of the sunset. 

Natural talk, like ploughing, should turn up 
a large surface of life, rather than dig mines into 
geological strata. Masses of experience, anecdote, 
incident, cross-lights, quotation, historical instances, 
the whole flotsam and jetsam of two minds forced 
in and in upon the matter in hand from every point 
of the compass, and from every degree of mental 
elevation and abasement — these are the material with 
which talk is fortified, the food on which the talkers 
thrive. Such argument as is proper to the exercise 
should still be brief and seizing. Talk should proceed 
by instances ; by the apposite, not the expository. It 
should keep close along the lines of humanity, near 
the bosoms and businesses of men, at the level where 
history, fiction and experience intersect and illu- 
minate each other. I am I, and You are You, with 
all my heart; but conceive how these lean proposi- 
tions change and brighten when, instead of words, 
the actual you and I sit cheek by jowl, the spirit 
housed in the live body, and the very clothes uttering 
voices to corroborate the story in the face. Not less 
surprising is the change when we leave off to speak 
of generalities — the bad, the good, the miser, and 
all the characters of Theophrastus — and call up other 
men, by anecdote or instance, in their very trick and 
feature; or trading on a common knowledge, toss 
each other famous names, still glowing with the hues 
of life. Communication is no longer by words, but 
by the instancing of whole biographies, epics, systems 
of philosophy, and epochs of history, in bulk. That 
which is understood excels that which is spoken in 



66 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

quantity and quality alike; ideas thus figured and 
personified, change hands, as we may say, like coin ; 
and the speakers imply without effort the most 
obscure and intricate thoughts. Strangers who have 
a large common ground of reading will, for this 
reason, come the sooner to the grapple of genuine 
converse. If they know Othello and Napoleon, Con- 
suelo and Clarissa Harlowe, Vautrin and Steenie 
Steenson, they can leave generalities and begin at 
once to speak by figures. 

Conduct and art are the two subjects that arise 
most frequently and that embrace the widest range 
of facts. A few pleasures bear discussion for their 
own sake, but only those which are most social 
or most radically human; and even these can 
only be discussed among their devotees. A tech- 
nicality is always welcome to the expert, whether 
in athletics, art or law; I have heard the best kind 
of talk on technicalities from such rare and happy 
persons as both know and love their business. No 
human being ever spoke of scenery for above two 
minutes at a time, which makes me suspect we hear 
too much of it in literature. The weather is regarded 
as the very nadir and scoff of conversational topics. 
And yet the weather, the dramatic element in scenery, 
is far more tractable in language, and far more 
human both in import and suggestion than the stable 
features of the landscape. Sailors and shepherds, 
and the people generally of coast and mountain, talk 
well of it; and it is often excitirgly presented in 
literature. But the tendency of all living talk draws 
it back and back into the common focus of humanity. 
Talk is a creature of the street and market-place, 
feeding on gossip; and its last resort is still in a 



TALK AND TALKERS 67 

discussion on morals. That is the heroic form of 
gossip; heroic in virtue of its high pretensions; but 
still gossip, because it turns on personalities. You 
can keep no men long, nor Scotchmen at all, off 
moral or theological discussion. These are to all the 
world what law is to lawyers; they are everybody's 
technicalities; the medium through which all con- 
sider life, and the dialect in which they express their 
judgments. I knew three young men who walked 
together daily for some two months in a solemn and 
beautiful forest and in cloudless summer weather; 
daily they talked with unabated zest, and yet scarce 
wandered that whole time beyond two subjects- 
theology and love. And perhaps neither a court of 
love nor an assembly of divines would have granted 
their premises or welcomed their conclusions. 

Conclusions, indeed, are not often reached by talk 
any more than by private thinking. That is not the 
profit. The profit is in the exercise, and above all 
in the experience; for when we reason at large on 
any subject, we review our state and history in life. 
From time to time, however, and specially, I think, 
in talking art, talk becomes effective, conquering like 
war, widening the boundaries of knowledge like an 
exploration. A point arises; the question takes a 
problematical, a baffling, yet a likely air ; the talkers 
begin to feel lively presentiments of some conclusion 
near at hand ; towards this they strive with emulous 
ardour, each by his own path, and struggling for 
first utterance ; and then one leaps upon the summit 
of that matter with a shout, and almost at the same 
moment the other is beside him ; and behold they 
are agreed. Like enough, the progress is illusory, 
a mere cat's cradle having been wound and unwound 



68 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

out of words. But the sense of joint discovery is 
none the less giddy and inspiring. And in the life 
of the talker such triumphs, though imaginary, are 
neither few nor far apart; they are attained with 
speed and pleasure, in the hour of mirth; and by 
the nature of the process, they are always worthily 
shared. 

There is a certain attitude combative at once and 
deferential, eager to fight yet most averse to quarrel, 
which marks out at once the talkable man. It is not 
eloquence, not fairness, not obstinacy, but a certain 
proportion of all of these that I love to encounter 
in my amicable adversaries. They must not be pon- 
tiffs holding doctrine, but huntsmen questing after 
elements of truth. Neither must they be boys to 
be instructed, but fellow-teachers with whom I may 
wrangle and agree on equal terms. We must reach 
some solution, some shadow of consent ; for without 
that, eager talk becomes a torture. But we do not 
wish to reach it cheaply, or quickly, or without the 
tussle and effort wherein pleasure lies. 

The very best talker, with me, is one whom I shall 
call Spring-Heel 'd Jack. I say so, because I never 
knew anyone who mingled so largely the possible 
ingredients of converse. In the Spanish proverb, 
the fourth man necessary to compound a salad, is 
a madman to mix it : Jack is that madman. I know 
not what is more remarkable; the insane lucidity 
of his conclusions, the humorous eloquence of his 
language, or his power of method, bringing the 
whole of life into the focus of the subject treated, 
mixing the conversational salad like a drunken god. 
He doubles like the serpent, changes and flashes like 
the shaken kaleidoscope, transmigrates bodily into' 



TALK AND TALKERS 69 

the views of others, and so, in the twinkling of an 
eye and with a heady rapture, turns questions inside 
out and flings them empty before you on the ground, 
like a triumphant conjuror. It is my common prac- 
tice when a piece of conduct puzzles me, to attack 
it in the presence of Jack with such grossness, such 
partiality and such wearing iteration, as at length 
shall spur him up in its defence. In a moment he 
transmigrates, dons the required character, and with 
moonstruck philosophy justifies the act in question. 
I can fancy nothing to compare with the vim of these 
impersonations, the strange scale of language, flying 
from Shakespeare to Kant, and from Kant to Major 
Dyngwell— 

" As fast as a musician scatters sounds 
Out of an instrument—" 

the sudden, sweeping generalisations, the absurd 
irrelevant particularities, the wit, wisdom, folly, 
humour, eloquence and bathos, each startling in its 
kind, and yet all luminous in the admired disorder 
of their combination. A talker of a different calibre, 
though belonging to the same school, is Burly. Burly 
is a man of great presence; he commands a larger 
atmosphere, gives the impression of a grosser mass 
of character than most men. It has been said of him 
that his presence could be felt in a room you entered 
blindfold; and the same, I think, has been said of 
other powerful constitutions condemned to much 
physical inaction. There is something boisterous 
and piratic in Burly 's manner of talk which suits 
well enough with this impression. He will roar you 
down, he will bury his face in his hands, he will 



70 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

undergo passions of revolt and agony; and mean- 
while his attitude of mind is really both conciliatory 
and receptive ; and after Pistol has been out-Pistol 'd, 
and the welkin rung for hours, you begin to perceive 
a certain subsidence in these spring torrents, points 
of agreement issue, and you end arm-in-arm, and in 
a glow of mutual admiration. The outcry only serves 
to make your final union the more unexpected and 
precious. Throughout there has been perfect sin- 
cerity, perfect intelligence, a desire to hear although 
not always to listen, and an unaffected eagerness to 
meet concessions. You have, with Burly, none of 
the dangers that attend debate with Spring-Heel'd 
Jack; who may at any moment turn his powers of 
transmigration on yourself, create for you a view 
you never held, and then furiously fall on you for 
holding it. These, at least, are my two favourites, 
and both are loud, copious intolerant talkers. This 
argues that I myself am in the same category; for 
if we love talking at all, we love a bright, fierce 
adversary, who will hold his ground, foot by foot, 
in much our own manner, sell his attention dearly, 
and give us our full measure of the dust and exertion 
of battle. Both these men can be beat from a posi- 
tion, but it takes six hours to do it ; a high and hard 
adventure, worth attempting. With both you can 
pass days in an enchanted country of the mind, with 
people, scenery and manners of its own ; live a life 
apart, more arduous, active and glowing than any 
real existence; and come forth again when the talk 
is over, as out of a theatre or a dream, to find the 
east wind still blowing and the chimney-pots of the 
old battered city still around you. Jack has the 
far finer mind. Burly the far more honest; Jack 



TALK AND TALKERS 71 

gives us the animated poetry, Burly the romantic 
prose, of similar themes; the one glances high like 
a meteor and makes a light in darkness; the other, 
with many changing hues of fire, burns at the sea- 
level, like a conflagration; but both have the same 
humour and artistic interests, the same unquenched 
ardour in pursuit, the same gusts of talk and thun- 
derclaps of contradiction. 

Cockshot^ is a different article, but vastly enter- 
taining, and has been meat and drink to me for many 
a long evening. His manner is dry, brisk and per- 
tinacious, and the choice of words not much. The 
point about him is his extraordinary readiness and 
spirit. You can propound nothing but he has either 
a theory about it ready-made, or will have one in- 
stantly on the stocks, and proceed to lay its timbers 
and launch it in your presence. ''Let me see," he 
will say. ''Give me a moment. I should have some 
theory for that." A blither spectacle than the 
vigour with which he sets about the task, it were hard 
to fancy. He is possessed by a demoniac energy, 
welding the elements for his life, and bending ideas, 
as an athlete bends a horseshoe, with a visible and 
lively effort. He has, in theorising, a compass, an 
art; what I would call the synthetic gusto ; something 
of a Herbert Spencer, who should see the fun of the 
thing. You are not bound, and no more is he, to 
place your faith in these brand-new opinions. But 
some of them are right enough, durable even for 
life; and the poorest serve for a cock-shy— as when 
idle people, after picnics, float a bottle on a pond 
and have an hour's diversion ere it sinks. Which- 
ever they are, serious opinions or humours of the 
*Tlie Late Fleeming Jenkin. 



72 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

moment, he still defends his ventures with inde- 
fatigable wit and spirit, hitting savagely himself, 
but taking punishment like a man. He knows and 
never forgets that people talk, first of all, for the 
sake of talking ; conducts himself in the ring, to use 
the old slang, like a thorough "glutton," and 
honestly enjoys a telling facer from his adversary. 
Cockshot is bottled effervescency, the sworn foe of 
sleep. Three-in-the-morning Cockshot, says a victim. 
His talk is like the driest of all imaginable dry 
champagnes. Sleight of hand and inimitable quick- 
ness are the qualities by which he lives. Athelred, 
on the other hand, presents you with the spectacle 
of a sincere and somewhat slow nature thinking 
aloud. He is the most unready man I ever knew 
to shine in conversation. You may see him some- 
times wrestle with a refractory jest for a minute or 
two together, and perhaps fail to throw it in the 
end. And there is something singularly engaging, 
often instructive, in the simplicity with which he 
thus exposes the process as well as the result, the 
works as well as the dial of the clock. Withal he 
has his hours of inspiration. Apt words come to 
him as if by accident, and, coming from deeper down, 
they smack the more personally, they have the more 
of fine old crusted humanity, rich in sediment and 
humour. There are sayings of his in which he has 
stamped himself into the very grain of the language ; 
you would think he must have worn the words next 
his skin and slept with them. Yet it is not as a 
sayer of particular good things that Athelred is 
most to be regarded, rather as the stalwart woodman 
of thought. I have pulled on a light cord often 
enough, while he has been wielding the broad-axe; 



TALK AND TALKERS 73 

and between us, on this unequal division, many a 
specious fallacy has .fallen. I have known him to 
battle the same question night after night for years, 
keeping it in the reign of talk, constantly applying 
it and re-applying it to life wdth humorous or grave 
intention, and all the while, never hurrying, nor 
flagging, nor taking an unfair advantage of the facts. 
Jack at a given moment, when arising, as it were, 
from the tripod, can be more radiantly just to those 
from whom he differs; but then the tenor of his 
thoughts is even calumnious ; while Athelred, slower 
to forge excuses, is yet slower to condemn, and sits 
over the welter of the world, vacillating but still 
judicial, and still faithfully contending with his 
doubts. 

Both the last talkers deal much in points of con- 
duct and religion studied in the "dry light" of 
prose. Indirectly and as if against his will the same 
elements from time to time appear in the troubled 
and poetic talk of Opalstein. His various and exotic 
knowledge, complete although unready sympathies, 
and fine, full, discriminative flow of language, fit 
him out to be the best of talkers; so perhaps he is 
with some, not quite with me—proxime ace ess it, I 
should say. He sings the praises of the earth and 
the arts, flowers and jewels, wine and music, in a 
moonlight, serenading manner, as to the light guitar ; 
even wisdom comes from his tongue like singing; 
no one is, indeed, more tuneful in the upper notes. 
But even while he sings the song of the Sirens, he 
still hearkens to the barking of the Sphinx. Jarring 
Byronic notes interrupt the flow of his Horatian 
humours. His mirth has something of the tragedy 
of the world for its perpetual background; and he 



74 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

feasts like Don Giovanni to a double orchestra, one 
lightly sounding for the dance, one pealing Beethoven 
in the distance. He is not truly reconciled either 
with life or with himself; and this instant war in 
his members sometimes divides the man's attention. 
He does not always, perhaps not often, frankly sur- 
render himself in conversation. He brings into the 
talk other thoughts than those which he expresses; 
you are conscious that he keeps an eye on something 
else, that he does not shake off the world, nor quite 
forget himself. Hence arise occasional disappoint- 
ments; even an occasional unfairness for his com- 
panions, who find themselves one day giving too 
much, and the next, when they are wary out of 
season, giving perhaps too little. Purcel is in another 
class from any I have mentioned. He is no de- 
bater, but appears in conversation, as occasion rises, 
in two distinct characters, one of which I admire 
and fear, and the other love. In the first, he is 
radiant! 3^ civil and rather silent, sits on a high, 
courtly hilltop, and from that vantage-ground drops 
you his remarks like favours. He seems not to share 
in our sublunary contentions; he wears no sign of 
interest; when on a sudden there falls in a crystal 
of wit, so polished that the dull do not perceive it, 
but so right that the sensitive are silenced. True 
talk should have more body and blood, should be 
louder, vainer and more declaratory of the man ; the 
true talker should not hold so steady an advantage 
over whom he speaks with; and that is one reason 
out of a score why I prefer my Purcel in his second 
character, when he unbends into a strain of graceful 
gossip, singing like the fireside kettle. In these 
moods he has au elegant homeliness that rings of the 



TALK AND TALKERS 75 

true Queen Anne. I know another person who 
attains, in his moments, to the insolence of a Res- 
toration comedy, speaking, I declare, as Congreve 
wrote ; but that is a sport of nature, and scarce falls 
under the rubric, for there is none, alas I to give him 
answer. 

One last remark occurs : It is the mark of genuine 
conversation that the sayings can scarce be quoted 
with their full effect beyond the circle of common 
friends. To have their proper weight they should 
appear in a biography, and with the portrait of the 
speaker. Good talk is dramatic; it is like an im- 
promptu piece of acting where each should represent 
himself to the greatest advantage; and that is the 
best kind of talk where each speaker is most fully 
and candidly himself, and where, if you were to 
shift the speeches round from one to another, there 
would be the greatest loss in significance and per- 
spicuity. It is for this reason that talk depends so 
wholly on our company. We should like to intro- 
duce Fal staff and Mercutio, or Falstaff and Sir Toby ; 
but Falstaff in talk with Cordelia seems even painful. 
Most of us, by the Protean quality of man, can talk 
to some degree with all ; but the true talk, that strikes 
out all the slumbering best of us, comes only with 
the peculiar brethren of our spirits, is founded as 
deep as love in the constitution of our being, and 
is a thing to relish with all our energy, while yet 
we have it, and to be grateful for forever. 



76 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 



11^ 



In the last paper there was perhaps too much aoout 
mere debate ; and there was nothinfi: said at all 
about that kind of talk which is merely luminous and 
restful, a higher power of silence, the quiet of the 
evening shared by ruminating friends. There is 
something, aside from personal preference, to be 
alleged in support of this omission. Those who are 
no chimney-cornerers, who rejoice in the social thun- 
derstorm, have a ground in reason for their choice. 
They get little rest indeed ; but restfulness is a qual- 
ity for cattle ; the virtues are all active, life is alert, 
and it is in repose that men prepare themselves for 
evil. On the other hand, they are bruised into a 
knowledge of themselves and others; they have in 
a high degree the fencer's pleasure in dexterity dis- 
played and proved; what they get they get upon 
life's terms, paying for it as they go; and once the 
talk is launched, they are assured of honest dealing 
from an adversary eager like themselves. The abo- 
riginal man within us, the cave-dweller, still lusty 
as when he fought tooth and nail for roots and 
berries, scents this kind of equal battle from afar; 
it is like his old primaeval days upon the crags, a 
return to the sincerity of savage life from the com- 
fortable fictions of the civilised. And if it be 
delightful to the Old Man, it is none the less profit- 
able to his younger brother, the conscientious gentle- 
man. I feel never quite sure of your urbane and 
*This sequel was called forth by an excellent article in 
The Spectator, 



TALK AND TALKERS 77 

smiling coteries; I fear they indulge a man's vanities 
in silence, suffer him to encroach, encourage him on 
to be an ass, and send him forth again, not merely 
contemned for the moment, but radically more con- 
temptible than when he entered. But if I have a 
flushed, blustering fellow for my opposite, bent on 
carrying a point, my vanity is sure to have its ears 
nibbed, once at least, in the course of the debate. 
He will not spare me when we differ; he will not 
fear to demonstrate my folly to my face. 

For many natures there is not much charm in 
the still, chambered society, the circle of bland coun- 
tenances, the digestive silence, the admired remark, 
the flutter of affectionate approval. They demand 
more atmosphere and exercise; "a gale upon their 
spirits," as our pious ancestors would phrase it; 
to have their wits well breathed in an uproarious 
Valhalla. And I suspect that the choice, given their 
character and faults, is one to be defended. The 
purely wise are silenced by facts; they talk in a 
clear atmosphere, problems lying around them like 
a view in nature; if they can be shown to be some- 
what in the wrong, they digest the reproof like a 
thrashing, and make better intellectual blood. They 
stand corrected by a whisper; a word or a glance 
reminds them of the great eternal law. But it is 
n(;t so with all. Others in conversation seek rather 
contact with their fellow-men than increase of 
knowledge or clarity of thought. The drama, not 
the philosophy, of life is the sphere of their intel- 
lectual activity. Even when they pursue truth, they 
desire as much as possible of what we may call 
human scenery along the read they follow. They 
dwell in the heart of life ; the blood sounding in 



78 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

their ears, their eyes laying hold of what delighte 
them with a brutal avidity that makes them blind 
to all besides, their interest riveted on people, living, 
loving, talking, tangible people. To a man of this 
description, the sphere of argument seems very pale 
and ghostly. By a strong expression, a perturbed 
countenance, floods of tears, an insult which his 
conscience obliges him to swallow, he is brought 
round to knowledge which no syllogism would have 
conveyed to him. His own experience is so vivid, 
he is so superlatively conscious of himself, that if, 
day after day, he is allowed to hector and hear noth- 
ing but approving echoes, he will lose his hold on 
the soberness of things and take himself in earnest 
for a god. Talk might be to such an one the very 
way of moral ruin ; the school where he might learn 
to be at once intolerable and ridiculous. 

This character is perhaps commoner than phil- 
osophers suppose. And for persons of that stamp 
to learn much by conversation, they must speak Avith 
their superiors, not in intellect, for that is a supe- 
riority that must be proved, but in station. If they 
cannot find a friend to bully them for their good, 
they must find either an old man, a woman, or some 
one so far below them in the artificial order of 
society, that courtesy may be particularly exercised. 

The best teachers are the aged. To the old our 
mouths are always partly closed; we must swallow 
our obvious retorts and listen. They sit above our 
heads, on life's raised dais, and appeal at once to 
our respect and pity. A fiavour of the old school, 
a touch of something different in their manner— 
which is freer and rounder, if they come of what 
is called a good family, and often more timid and 



TALK AND TALKERS 70 

precise if they are of the middle class — serves, in 
these days, to accentuate the difference of age and 
add a distinction to gray hairs. But their superiority 
is founded more deeply than by outward marks or 
gestures. They are before us in the march of man; 
they have more or less solved the irking problem ; 
they have battled through the equinox of life; in 
good and evil they have held their course ; and now, 
without open shame, they near the crown and har- 
bour. It may be we have beeu struck with one of 
fortune's darts; we can scarce be civil, so cruelly 
is our spirit tossed. Yet long before we were so 
much as thought upon, the like calamity befell the 
old man or woman that now, with pleasant humour, 
rallies us upon our inattention, sitting composed in 
the holy evening of man's life, in the clear shining 
after rain. We grow ashamed of our distresses new 
and hot and coarse, like villainous roadside brandy; 
we see life in aerial perspective, under the heavens 
of faith; and out of the worst, in the mere presence 
of contented elders, look forw^ard and take patience. 
Fear shrinks before them "like a thing reproved," 
not the flitting and ineffectual fear of death, but 
the instant, dwelling terror of the responsibilities 
and revenges of life. Their speech, indeed, is timid ; 
they report lions in the path ; they counsel a meticu- 
lous footing ; but their serene, marred faces are more 
eloquent and tell another story. Where they have 
gone, we will go also, not very greatly fearing ; what 
they have endured unbroken, we also, God helping 
us, will make a shift to bear. 

Not only is the presence of the aged in itself 
remedial, but their minds are stored with antidotes, 
Avisdom's simples, plain considerations overlooked 



80 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

by youth. They have matter to communicate, be they 
never so stupid. Their talk is not merely literature, 
it is great literature ; classic in virtue of the speaker's 
tletachment, studded, like a book of travel, with 
things we should not otherwise have learnt. In 
virtue, I have said, of the speaker's detachment— 
and this is why, of two old men, the one who is not 
your father speaks to you with the more sensible 
authority; for in the paternal relation the oldest 
have lively interests and remain still young. Thus 
I have known two young men great friends; each 
swore by the other 's father ; the father of each swore 
by the other lad; and yet each pair of parent and 
child were perpetually by the ears. This is typical : 
it reads like the germ of some kindly comedy. 

The old appear in conversation in two characters : 
the critically silent and the garrulous anecdotic. 
The last is perhaps what we look for; it is perhaps 
the more instructive. An old gentleman, well on 
in years, sits handsomely and naturally in the bow- 
window of his age, scanning experience with reverted 
eye; and chirping and smiling, communicates the 
accidents and reads the lesson of his long career. 
Opinions are strengthened, indeed, but they are also 
weeded out in the course of years. What remains 
steadily present to the eye of the retired veteran 
in his hermitage, what still ministers to his content, 
Avhat still quickens his old honest heart — these are 
''the real long-lived things" that Whitman tells us 
to prefer. Where youth agrees with age, not where 
they differ, wisdom lies ; and it is when the young 
disciple finds his heart to beat in tune with his grey- 
bearded teacher's that a lesson may be learned. T 
have known one old gentleman, whom I may name. 



TALK AND TALKERS 81 

for he is now gathered to his stock— Robert Hunter, 
Sheriff of Dumbarton, and author of an excellent 
law-book still re-edited and republished. Whether 
he was originally big or little is more than I can 
guess. When I knew him he was all fallen away 
and fallen in; crooked and shrunken; buckled into 
a stiff waistcoat for support; troubled by ailments, 
which kept him hobbling in and out of the room • 
one foot gouty ; a wig for decency, not for deception, 
on his head; close shaved, except under his chin — 
and for that he never failed to apologise, for it 
went sore against the traditions of his life. You 
can imagine how he would fare in a novel by Miss 
Mather; yet this rag of a Chelsea veteran lived to 
his last year in the plenitude of all that is best in 
man, brimming with human kindness, and staunch 
as a Roman soldier under his manifold infirmities' 
You could not say that he had lost his memory, for 
he would repeat Shakespeare and Webster and 
Jeremy Taylor and Burke by the page together ; but 
the parchment was filled up, there was no room for 
fresh inscriptions, and he was capable of repeating 
the same anecdote on many successive visits. His 
voice survived in its full power, and he took a pride 
in using it. On his last voyage as Commissioner of 
Lighthouses, he hailed a ship at sea and made him- 
self clearly audible without a speaking trumpet, 
ruffling the while with a proper vanity in his achieve- 
ment. He had a habit of eking out his Words with 
interrogative hems, which was puzzling and a little 
wearisome, suited ill with his appearance, and 
seemed a survival from some former stage of bodily 
portliness. Of yore, when he was a gr^at pedestriaii 
and no enemy to good cWret, he may have'pblnt€(d 



62 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

with these minute guns his allocutions to the bench. 
His humour was perfectly equable, set beyond the 
reach of fate; gout, rheumatism, stone and gravel 
might have combined their forces against that frail 
tabernacle, but when I came round on Sunday even- 
ing, he would lay aside Jeremy Taylor's Life of 
Christ and greet me with the same open brow, the 
same kind formality of manner. His opinions and 
sympathies dated the man almost to a decade. He 
had begun life, under his mother's influence, as an 
admirer of Junius, but on maturer knowledge had 
transferred his admiration to Burke. He cautioned 
me, with entire gravity, to be punctilious in writing 
English; never to forget that I was a Scotchman, 
that English was a foreign tongue, and that if I 
attempted the colloquial, I should certainly bo 
shamed: the remark was apposite, I suppose, in the 
days of David Hume. Scott was too new for him; 
he had known the author— known him, too, for a 
Tory; and to the genuine classic a contemporary is 
always something of a trouble. He had the old, 
serious love of the play; had even, as he w^as proud 
to tell, played a certain part in the history of Shake- 
spearian revivals, for he had successfully pressed 
on Murray, of the old Edinburgh Theatre, the idea 
of producing Shakespeare's fairy pieces with great 
scenic display. A moderate in religion, he was much 
struck in the last years of his life by a conversation 
with two young lads, revivalists. ' ' H 'm, " he would 
say— "new to me. I have had— h'm— no such ex- 
perience." It struck him, not with pain, rather with 
a solemn philosophic interest, that he, a Christian 
as he hoped, and a Christian of so old a standing, 
should hear these young fellows talkmg of his own 



TALK AND TALKERS 83 

subject, his own weapons that he had fought the 
battle of life with,— "and— h'm— not understand." 
In this wise and grateful attitude he did justice to 
himself and others, reposed unshaken in his old 
beliefs, and recognised their limits without anger 
or alarm. His last recorded remark, on the last 
night of his life, w^as after he had been arguing 
against Calvinism with his minister and was inter- 
rupted by an intolerable pang. "After all," he 
said, "of all the 'isms, I know none so bad as 
rheumatism." My own last sight of him was some 
time before, when we dined together at an inn; he 
had been on circuit, for he stuck to his duties like a 
chief part of his existence ; and I remember it as the 
only occasion on which he ever soiled his lips with 
slang— a thing he loathed. We were both Roberts; 
and as w^e took our places at table, he addressed me 
with a twinkle : ' ' We are just what you would call 
two bob." He offered me port, I remember, as the 
proper milk of youth; spoke of "twenty-shilling 
notes"; and throughout the meal was full of old- 
world pleasantry and quaintness, like an ancient 
boy on a holiday. But what I recall chiefly was his 
confession that he had never read Othello to an end. 
Shakespeare was his continual study. He loved noth- 
ing better than to display his knowledge and memory 
by adducing parallel passages from Shakespeare, 
passages where the same word was employed, or the 
same idea differently treated. But Othello had 
beaten him. "That noble gentleman and that noble 
lady— h'm— too painful for me." The same night 
the boardings were covered with posters, ' ' Burlesque 
of Othello/' and the contrast blazed up in my mind 
like a bonfire. An unforgettable look it gave me 



84 STEVEiNSON'S ESSAYS 

into that kind man's soul. His acquaintance was 
indeed a liberal and pious education. All the human- 
ities were taught in that bare dining-room beside his 
gouty footstool. He was a piece of good advice; he 
was himself the instance that pointed and adorned 
his various talk. Nor could a young man have found 
elsewhere a place so set apart from envy, fear, dis- 
content, or any of the passions that debase; a life 
so honest and composed ; a soul like an ancient violin, 
so subdued to harmony, responding to a touch in 
music— as in that dining-room, with Mr. Hunter 
chatting at the eleventh hour, under the shadow of 
eternity, fearless and gentle. 

The second class of old people are not anecdotic; 
they are rather hearers than talkers, listening to the 
young with an amused and critical attention. To 
have this sort of intercourse to perfection, I think 
we must go to old ladies. Women are better hearers 
than men, to begin with; they learn, I fear in an- 
guish, to bear with the tedious and infantile vanity 
of the other sex ; and we will take more from a woman 
than even from the oldest man in the way of biting 
comment. Biting comment is the chief part, whether 
for profit or amusement, in this business. The old 
lady that I have in my eye is a very caustic speaker, 
her tongue, after years of practice, in absolute com- 
mand, whether for silence or attack. If she chance 
to dislike you, you will be tempted to curse the 
malignity of age. But if you chance to please even 
slightly, you will be listened to with a particular 
laughing grace of sympathy, and from time to time 
chastised, as if in play, with a parasol as heavy as 
a pole-axe. It requires a singular art, as well as 
the vantaore-grouncl of ase, to deal these stunning 



TALK AND TALKERS 85 

corrections among the coxcombs of the young. The 
pill is disguised in sugar of wit ; it is administered 
as a compliment— if you had not pleased, you would 
not have been censured; it is a personal affair — a 
hyphen, a trait d' union, between you and your 
censor; age's philandering, for her pleasure and 
your good. Incontestably the young man feels very 
much of a fool ; but he must be a perfect Malvolio, 
sick with self-love, if he cannot take an open buffet 
and sfill smile. The correction of silence is what 
kills; when you know you have transgressed, and 
your friend says nothing and avoids your eye. If 
a man were made of gutta-percha, his heart would 
quail at such a moment. But when the word is out, 
the worst is over ; and a fellow with any good-humour 
at all may pass through a perfect hail of witty 
criticism, eyery bare place on his soul hit to the 
quick with a shrewd missile, and reappear, as if 
after a dive, tingling with a fine moral reaction, and 
ready, with a shrinking readiness, one-third loath, 
for a repetition of the discipline. 

There are few women, not well sunned and ripened, 
and perhaps toughened, who can thus stand apart 
from a man and say the true thing with a kind of 
genial cruelty. Still there are some— and I doubt 
if there be any man who can return the compliment. 
The class of men represented by Vernon Whitford 
in The Egoist, says, indeed, the true thing, but he 
says it stockishly. Vernon is a noble fellow, and 
makes, by the way, a noble and instructive contrast 
to Daniel Deronda ; his conduct is the conduct of 
a man of honour ; but we agree with him, against our 
consciences, when he remorsefully considers "its 
astonishing drvness." He is the best of men, but 



86 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

the best of women manage to combine all that and 
something more. Their very faults assist them ; 
they are helped even by the falseness of their position 
in life. They can retire into the fortified camp of 
the proprieties. They can touch a subject and 
suppress it. The most adroit employ a somewhat 
elaborate reserve as a means to be frank, much as 
they wear gloves when they shake hands. But a 
man has the full responsibility of his freedom, cannot 
evade a question, can scarce be silent without rude- 
ness, must answer for his words upon the moment, 
and is not seldom left face to face with a damning 
choice, between the more or less dishonourable wrig- 
gling of Deronda and the downright woodenness of 
Vernon Whitford. 

But the superiority of women is perpetually men- 
aced; they do not sit throned on infirmities like the 
old; they are suitors as well as sovereigns; their 
vanity is engaged, their affections are too apt to 
follow ; and hence much of the talk between the sexes 
degenerates into something unworthy of the name. 
The desire to please, to shine with a certain softness 
of lustre and to draw a fascinating picture of oneself, 
banishes from conversation all that is sterling and 
most of what is humorous. As soon as a strong 
current of mutual admiration begins to flow, the 
human interest triumphs entirely over the intellec- 
tual, and the commerce of words, consciously or not, 
becomes secondary to the commercing of eyes. But 
even where this ridiculous danger is avoided, and a 
man and woman converse equallj^ and honestly, 
something in their nature cr their education falsifies 
the strain. An instinct prompts them to agree; and 
where that is impossible, to agree to differ. Should 



TALK AND TALKERS 87 

they neglect the warning, at the first suspicion of 
an argument, they find themselves in different hemi- 
spheres. About any point of business or conduct, 
any actual affair demanding settlement, a woman 
will speak and listen, hear and answer arguments, 
not only with natural wisdom, but with candour and 
logical honesty. But if the subject of debate be 
something in the air, an abstraction, an excuse for 
talk, a logical Aunt Sally, then may the male debater 
instantly abandon hope; he may employ reason, 
adduce facts, be supple, be smiling, be angry, all 
shall avail him nothing; what the woman said first, 
that (unless she has forgotten it) she will repeat 
at the end. Hence, at the very junctures when a 
talk between men grows brighter and quicker and 
begins to promise to bear fruit, talk between the 
sexes is menaced with dissolution. The point of 
difference, the point of interest, is evaded by the 
brilliant woman, under a shower of irrelevant con- 
versational rockets; it is bridged by the discreet 
woman with a rustle of silk, as she passes smoothly 
forward to the nearest point of safety. And this 
sort of prestidigitation, juggling the dangerous topic 
out of sight until it can be reintroduced with safety 
in an altered shape, is a piece of tactics among the 
true drawing-room queens. 

The drawing-room is, indeed, an artificial place; 
it is so by our choice and for our sins. The subjec- 
tion of women ; the ideal imposed upon them from 
the cradle ; and worn, like a hair-shirt, with so much 
constancy; their motherly, superior tenderness to 
man's vanity and self-importance; their mana gins' 
arts— the arts of a civilised slave among good-natured 
barbarians— are all painful ingredients and all help 



88 STEVENSOxN'S ESSAYS 

to falsify relations. It is not till we get clear of 
that amusing artificial scene that genuine relations 
are founded, or ideas honestly compared. In the 
garden, on the road or the hillside, or tete-a-tete and 
apart from interruptions, occasions arise when we 
may learn much from any single woman; and no- 
where more often than in married life. Marriage is 
one long conversation, chequered by disputes. The 
disputes are valueless; they but ingrain the differ- 
ence; the heroic heart of woman prompting her at 
once to nail her colours to the mast. But in the 
intervals, almost unconsciously and with no desire 
to shine, the whole material of life is turned over 
and over, ideas are struck out and shared, the two 
persons more and more adapt their notions one to 
suit the other, and in process of time, without sound 
of trumpet, they conduct each other into new worlds 
of thought. 



NOTES 

THE two papers on Talk and Talkers first appeared 
in the Cornhill Magazine, for April and for August, 
1882, Vol. XLV, pp. 410-418, Vol. XLVI, pp. 151-158. 
The second paper had the title, Talk and Talkers. {A 
Sequel.) For Stevenson's relations with the Editor, see 
our note to An Apology for Idlers. With the publication 
of the second part, Stevenson's connection with the Corn- 
hill ceased, as the magazine in 1883 passed from the hands 
of Leslie Stephen into those of James Payn. The two 
papers next appeared in the volume Memories and Por- 
traits (1887). The first was composed during the winter 
of 1881-2 at Davos in the Alps, whither he had gone for 
his health, the second a few months later. Writing to 
Charles Baxter, 22 Feb. 1882, he said, "In an article which 
will appear sometime in the Cornhill, 'Talk and Talkers.' 
and where I have full-lengthened the conversation of Bob, 
Henley, Jenkin, Simpson, Symonds, and Gosse, I have at 
the end one single word about yourself. It may amuse 
you to see it." {Letters, I, 268.) Writing from Bourne- 
mouth, England, in February 1885 to Sidney Colvin, he 
said, "See how my 'Talk and Talkers' went; every one 
liked his own portrait, and shrieked about other people's; 
so it wdll be with yours. If you are the least true to the 
essential, the sitter will be pleased; very likely not his 
friends, and that from various motives." {Letters, I, 413.) 
In a letter to his mother from Davos, dated 9 April 1882, 
he gives the real names opposite each character in the first 
paper, and adds, "But pray regard these as secrets." 

The art of conversation, like the art of letter-writing, 
reached its highest point in the eighteenth century ; cheap 



90 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

postage destroyed the latter, and the hurly-burly of modern 
life has been almost too strong for the former. In the 
French Salons of the eighteenth century, and in the coffee- 
houses and drawing-rooms of England, good conversation 
was regarded as a most desirable accomplishment, and was 
practised by many with extraordinary wit and skill. Swift's 
satire on Polite Conversation (1738) as well as the number 
of times he discusses the art of conversation in other 
places, shows how seriously he actually regarded it. 
Stevenson, like many persons who are forced away from 
active life, loved a good talk. Good writers are perhaps 
now more common than good talkers. 

FIRST PAPER 

Page 61. Sii% we had a good talk. This remark was 
made by the Doctor in 1768, the morning after a memo- 
rable meeting at the Crown and Anchor tavern, where he 
had been engaged in conversation with seven or eight 
notable literary men. "When I called upon Dr. Johnson 
next morning," says Boswell, "I found him highly satisfied 
with his colloquial prowess the preceding evening. 'Well,' 
said he, 'we had good talk.' Boswell : 'Yes, sir, you tossed 
and gored several persons.' " 

As we must account. This remark of Eranklin's occurs 
in Poo7' Bichard's Almanac for 1738. 

Page 62. Flies . . . in the amber. Bartlett gives Mar- 
tial. 



"The bee enclosed and through the amber shown, 
Seems buried in the juice which was his own." 

Bacon, Donne, Herriek, Pope and many other authors 
speak of flies in amber. 

Page 62. Fancy free. See Midsummer Night's Dream^ 
Act II, Sc, 2, 



NOTES 91 

"And the imperial votaress passed on, 
In maiden meditation, fancy-free." 
This has been called the most graceful among all the 
countless compliments received by Queen Elizabeth. The 
word "fancy" in the Shaksperian quotation means simply 
"love." 

Page 62. A spade a spade. The phrase really comes 
from Aristophanes, and is quoted by Plutarch, as Philip's 
description of the rudeness of the Macedonians. Kudos. 
Greek word for "pride", used as slang by school-boys in 
England. 

Page 64. Trailing clouds of glory. See our note on 
page 60. 

Page 64. The Flying Dutchman. Wagner's Der 
Fliegende Hollander (1843), one of his earliest, shortest, 
and most beautiful operas. Many German performances 
are given in the afternoon, and many German theatres have 
pretty gardens attached, where, during the long intervals 
{grosse Pause) between the acts, one may refresh himself 
with food, drink, tobacco, and the open air. Germany and 
German art, however, did not have anything like the 
influence on Stevenson exerted by the French country, 
language, and literature. 

Page 65. Theophrastus. A Greek philosopher who died 
287 B. C. His most influential work was his Characters, 
which, subsequently translated into many modern lan- 
guages, produced a whole school of literature known as 
the "Character Books," of which the best are perhaps Sir 
Thomas Overbury's Characters (1614), John Earle's 
Microcosmographie (1628), and the Caracteres (1688) of 
the great French writer. La Bruyere. 

Page 66. Consuelo, Clarissa Harlowe, Vautrin, Steenie 
Steenson. Consuelo is the title of one of the most notable 
novels by the famous French authoress, George Sand. 
(1804-1876), whose real name was Aurore Dupin. Con- 
suelo appeared in 1842. . . . Clarissa (1747-8) was the 
masterpiece of the novelist Samuel Richardson (1689- 



92 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

1761). This great novel, in seven fat volumes, was a 
warm favorite with Stevenson, as it has been Avith most 
English writers from Dr. Johnson to Macanlay. Writing 
to a friend in December 1877, Stevenson said, "Please, if 
you have not, and I don't suppose you have, already read 
it, institute a search in all Melbourne for one of the 
rarest and certainly one of the best of hooks— Clarissa 
Harlowe. For any man who takes an interest in tlr? 
problems of the two sexes, that book is a jjerfect mine of 
documents. And it is written, sir, with the pen of an 
angel." {Letters, I, 141.) Editions of Clarissa are not 
so scarce now as they were thirty years ago; several have 
appeared within the last few years. . . . Vautrin is one 
of the most remarkable characters in several novels of 
Balzac; see especially Pere Goriot (1834) ... Steenie 
Steenson in Scott's novel Bedgauntlet (1824). 

Page ^Q. No human being, etc. Stevenson loved action 
in novels, and was impatient, as many readers are, when 
long-drawn descriptions of scenery were introduced. 
Furthermore, the love for wild scenery has become as 
fashionable as the love for music ; the result being a very 
general hypocrisy in assumed ecstatic raptures. 

Page 67. You can keep no men long, nor Scotchmen 
at all. Every Scotchman is a born theologian. Franklin 
says in his Autobiography, "I had caught this by reading 
my father's books of dispute on Religion. Persons of 
good sense, I have since observed seldom fall into it, 
except lawyers, university men, and generally men of all 
sorts who have been bred at Edinburgh." (Chap. I.) 

Page 67. A court of love. A mediaeval institution of 
chivalry, where questions of knight-errantry, constancy 
in love, etc., were discussed and for the time being, decided. 
Page 68. Spring-HeeVd Jack. This is Stevenson's 
cousin "Bob," Robert Alan Mowbray Stevenson (1847- 
1900), an artist and later Professor of Fine Arts at 
IJniversity College, Liverpool. He was one of the best 
conversationalists in England. Stevenson said of him, 



NOTES 93 

"My cousin Bob, ... is the man likest and most unlike to 
me tliat I have ever met. . . . What was specially his, 
and genuine, was his faculty for turning over a subject in 
conversiition. There was an insane lucidity in his con- 
clusions; a singular, humorous eloquence in his language, 
and a power of method, bringing the whole of life into 
the focus of the subject under hand; none of which I 
have ever heard equalled or even approached by any other 
talker." (Balfour's Life of Stevenson, 1, 103. For further 
remarks on the cousin, see note to page 104 of the Life.) 

Page 69. From Shakespeare to Kant, from Kant to 
Major Dyngivell. Immanuel Kant, the foremost phi- 
losopher of the eighteenth century, born at Konigsberg in 
1724, died 1804. His greatest work, the • Critique of Pure 
Reason {Kritick der reinen Vernimft, 1781), produced 
about the same revolutionary effect on metaphysics as 
that produced by Copernicus in astronomy, or by Darwin 
in natural science. . . . Major Dyngwell I know not. 

Page 69. Burly. Burly is Stevenson's friend, the poet 
William Ernest Henley, who died in 1903. His sonnet on 
our author may be found in the introduction to this book. 
Leslie Stephen introduced the two men on 13 Feb. 1875, 
when Henley was in the hospital, and a very close and 
intimate friendship began. Henley's personality Avas 
exceedingly robust, in Contrast with his health, and in his 
writings and talk he delighted in shocking people. His 
philosophy of life is seen clearly in his most characteristic 
poem : 

"Out of the night that covers me, 
Black as the Pit from pole to pole, 
I thank whatever Gods may be 
For my unconquerable soul. 

In the fell clutch of circumstance 
I have not winced nor cried aloud. 

Under the bludgeonings of chance 
My head is bloody, but unbowed. 



94 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

Beyond this place of wrath and tears 
Looms but the Horror of the shade, 

And yet the menace of the years 
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid. 

It matters not how strait the gate, 

How charged with punishments the scroll, 

I am the master of my fate : 
I am the Captain of my soul." 

After the publication of Balfoui^s Life of Stevenson 
(1901), Mr, Henley contributed to the Pall Mall Magazine 
in December of that year an article called R. L. S., which 
made a tremendous sensation. It was regarded by many 
of Stevenson's friends as a wanton assault on his private 
character. Whether justified or not, it certainly damaged 
Henley more than the dead author. For further accounts 
of the relations between the two men, see index to Balfour's 
Life, under the title Henley. 

Page 70. Pistol has been out-PistoVd. The burlesque 
character in Shakspere's King Henry IV and V. 

Page 71. Cockshot. As the note says, this was Pro- 
fessor Fleeming Jenkin, who died 12 June 1885. He 
exercised a great influence over the younger man. Steven- 
son paid the debt of gratitude he owed him by writing 
the Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin^ published first in America 
by Charles Scribner's Sons, in 1887. 

Page 71. Syyithetic gusto; something of a Herbert 
Spencer. The English philosopher, Herbert Spencer 
(1820-1903), whose many volumes in various fields of 
science and metaphysics were called by their author the 
Synthetic Philosophy. His most popular book is First 
Principles (1862), Avhich has exercised an enormous in- 
fluence in the direction of agnosticism. His Autobiog- 
raphy, two big volumes, was published in 1904, and fell 
rather flat. 

Page 72. Like a thorough "glutton." This is still the 



NOTES 95 

slang of the prize-ring. When a man is able to stand a 
great deal of punching without losing consciousness or 
courage, he is called a "glutton for punishment." 

Page 72. Athelred. Sir Walter Simpson, who was 
Stevenson's companion on the Inland Voyage. For 
a good account of him, see Balfour's Life of Stevenson, 
I, 106. 

Page 73. ''Dry light:' "The more perfect soul," says 
Heraclitus, "is a dry light, which flies out of the body as 
lightning breaks from a cloud." Plutarch, Life of Romulus. 
Page 73. Opalstein. This was the writer and art 
critic, John Addington Symonds (1840-1893). Like 
Stevenson, he was afflicted with lung trouble, and spent 
much of his time at Davos, Switzerland, where a good 
part of his literary work was done. "The great feature of 
the place for Stevenson was the presence of John Adding- 
ton Symonds, who, ha\dng come there three years before 
on his way to Egypt, had taken up his abode in Davos, 
and was now building himself a house. To him the 
newcomer bore a letter of introduction from Mr. Gosse. 
On November 5th (1880) Louis wrote to his mother: ^We 
got to Davos last evening; and I feel sure we shall like 
it greatly. I saw Symonds this morning, and already 
like him; it is such sport to have a literary man around. 
. . . Symonds is like a Tait to me ; eternal interest in the 
same topics, eternal cross-causewaying of special know- 
ledge. That makes hours to fly.' And a little later he 
wrote: 'Beyond its splendid climate, Davos has but one 
advantage— the neighbouiliood of J. A. Symonds. I dare 
say you know his work, but the man is far more interest- 
ing.'" (Balfour's Life of Stevenson, I, 214.) When 
Symonds first read the essay Talk and Talkers, he pre- 
tended to be angry, and said, "Louis Stevenson, what do 
you mean by describing me as a moonlight serenader?" 
{Life, I, 233.) 
Page 73. Proxime accessit. "He comes very near to it." 
Page 73. Sirens . . . Sphinx . Byronic . . . Horatian 



96 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

, . . Don Giovanni . . . Beethoven. The Sirens were the 
famous women of Greek mythology, who lured mariners 
to destruction by the overpowering sweetness of their 
songs. How Ulysses outwitted them is well-known to all 
readers of the Odyssey. One of Tennyson's earlier poems, 
The Sea-Fairies, deals with the same theme, and indeed it 
has appeared constantly in the literature of the world. . . 
The Sphinx, a familar subject in Egyptian art, had a 
lion's body, the head of some other animal (sometimes 
man) and wings. It was a symbolical figure. The most 
famous example is of course the gigantic Sphinx near the 
Pyramids in Egypt, which has proved to be an inexhaust- 
ible theme for speculation and for poetry. . . . The the- 
atrically tragic mood of Byron is contrasted with the 
easy-going, comewhat cynical epicureanism of Horace. . . . 
Don Giovanni (1787) the greatest opera of the great 
composer Mozart (1756-1791), tells the same storj^ told by 
Moliere and so many others. See note on page 58. The 
French composer, Gounod, said that Mozart's Don Giovanni 
was the greatest musical composition that the world has ever 
^een ... Beethoven (1770-1827) occupies in general es- 
timation about the same place in the history of music that 
Shakspere fills in the history of literature. 

Page 74. Purcel. This stands for Mr. Edmund Gosse 
(born 1849), a poet and critic of some note, who writes 
pleasantly on many topics. Many of Stevenson's letters 
were addressed to him. The two friends first met in 
London in 1877, and the impression made by the novelist 
on the critic may be seen in Mr. Gosse's book of essays, 
Critical Kitcats (1896). 

Page 75. I know another person. This is undoubtedly 
Stevenson's friend Charles Baxter. See the quotation 
from a letter to him in our introductory note to this 
essay on page 89. Compare what Stevenson elsewhere said 
of him: "I cannot characterise a personality so unusual 
in the little space that I can here afford. I have never 
known one of so mingled a strain. . . . He is the onlv 



NOTES - 97 

man I ever heard of who eoulcl give and take in conver- 
sation with, the wit and polish of style that we find in 
Congreve's comedies." (Balfour's Life of Stevenson, I, 
105.) 

Page 75. Restoration comedy . . . Congreve. Restora- 
tion comedy is a general name applied to the plays acted 
in England between 1660, the year of the restoration of 
Charles II to the throne, and 1700, the year of the death 
of Dryden. This comedy is as remarkable for the bril- 
liant wit of its dialogue as for its gross licentiousness. 
Perhaps the wittiest dramatist of the whole group was 
William Congreve (1670-1729). 

Page 75. Falstaff . . . Mercutio . . . Sir Toby . . . Cor- 
delia ... Protean. Sir John Falstaff, who ajDpears in 
Shakspere's King Henry IV, and again in the Merry 
Wives of Windsor, is generally regarded as the greatest 
comic character in literature . . . Mercutio, the friend of 
Romeo; one of the most marvellous of all Shakspere's 
gentlemen. He is the Hotsi3ur of comedy, and his taking 
off by Tybalt "eclipsed the gaiety of nations." . . . Sir Toby 
Belch is the genial character in Twelfth Night, fond of 
singing and drinking, but no fool withal. A conversation 
between Falstaff, Mercutio, and Sir Toby would have 
taxed even the resources of a Shakspere, and would have 
been intolerably excellent. . . . Cordelia, the daughter of 
King Lear, whose sincerity and tenderness combined make 
her one of the greatest women in the history of poetry. . . . 
Protean, something that constantly assumes different 
forms. In mythology, Proteus was the son of Oceanus 
and Tethys, whose special power was his faculty for 
lightning changes. 

"Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea." 

—Wordsworth. 

Page 76. Note. The article referred to appeared in the 
Spectator for 1 April 1882, and bore the. title. The 



98 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

Restfulness of Talk. The opening words of tliis article 
were as follows:— "The fine paper on 'Talk/ by 'R. L. S./ 
in the Cornhill for April, a paper Avhicli a century since 
would, by itself, have made a literary reputation, does 
not cover the whole field." 

Page 77. Valhalla. In Scandinavian mythology, this 
was the heaven for the brave who fell in battle. Here 
they had an eternity of fighting and drinking. 

Page 79. Meticulous. Timid. From the Latin, meti- 
culosus. 

Page 80. Kindly. Here used in the old sense of 
"natural." Compare the Litany, "the kindly fruits of the 
earth." 

Page 80. ''The real long-lived things." For Whitman, 
see our note on page 57. 

Page 81. Robert Hunter^ Sheriff' of Dumbarton. Hun- 
ter recognised the genius in Stevenson long before the 
latter became known to the world, and gave him much 
friendly encouragement. Dumbarton is a town about 16 
miles north-west of Glasgow, in Scotland. It contains a 
castle famous in history and in literature. 

Page 81. A novel by Miss Mather. The name should 
be "Mathers." Helen Mathers (Mrs. Henry Reeves), born 
in 1853, has written a long series of novels, of which 
My Lady Greensleeves, The Sin of Hagar and Venus 
Victrix are perhaps as well-known as they deserve to be. 

Page 81. Chelsea. Formerly a suburb, now a part of 
London, to the S. W. It is famous for its literary associ- 
ations. Swift, Thomas Carlyle, Leigh Hunt, George 
Eliot, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and many other distinguished 
writers lived in Chelsea at various times. It contains a 
great hospital, to which Stevenson seems to refer here. 

Page 81. Webster, Jeremy Taylor, Burke. John Web- 
ster was one of the Elizabethan dramatists, who, in 
felicity of diction, approached more nearly to Shakspere 
than most of his contemporaries. His greatest play was 
The Duchess of Malfi (acted in 1616). Jeremy Taylor 



NOTES 99 

(1613-1667), often called the "Shakspere of Divines," was 
one of the greatest pulpit orators in English history. His 
most famous work, still a classic, is Holy Living and Holy 
Dying (1650-1). Edmund Burke (1729-1797) the parli- 
amentary orator and author of the Sublime and Beautiful 
(1756), whose speeches on America are only too familiar 
to American schoolboys. 

Page 82. Junius. No one knows yet who "Junius" 
was. In the Public Advertiser from 21 Jan. 1769 to 
21 Jan. 1772, appeared letters signed by this name, which 
made a sensation. The identity of the author was a 
favorite matter for dispute during many years. 

Page 82, David Hume. The great Scotch skeptic and 
philosopher ( 1711-1776 ) , 

Page 828. Shakespeare's fairy pieces with great scenic 
display. So far from this being a novelty to-day, it has 
become rather nauseating, and there are evidences of a 
reaction in favour of hearing Shakspere on the stage rather 
than seeing him. 

Page 83. Calvinism. If this word does not need a 
note yet, it certainly will before long. The founder of the 
theological system Calvinism was John Calvin, born in 
Prance in 1509. The chief doctrines are Predestination, 
the Atonement (by which the blood of Christ appeased 
the wrath of God toward those persons only who had 
been previously chosen for salvation— on all others the 
sacrifice was ineffectual). Original Sin, and the Persever- 
ance of the Saints (once sa;ved, one could not fall from 
grace). These doctrines remained intact in the creed of 
Presbyterian churches in America until a year or two ago. 

Page 83. Two bob. A pun, for "bob" is slang for 
"shilling." 

Page 83. Never read Othello to an end. In A Gossip 
on a Novel of Dumas's, Stevenson confessed that there 
were four plays of Shakspere he had never been able to 
read through, though for a different reason: they were 
Richard III, Henry VI, Titus Andronicus, and AlVs Well 



100 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

that Ends Well. It is still an open question as to whether 
or. not Shakspere wrote Titus. 

Page 84. A liberal and pious education. It was Sir 
Richard Steele who made the phrase, in The Tatler, No. 
49: "to love her (Lady Elizabeth Hastings) was a liberal 
education." 

Page 85. Trait d'union. The French expression simply 
means "hyphen" : literally, "mark of connection." 

Page 85. Malvolio. The conceited but not wholly 
contemptible character in Twelfth Night. 

Page 85. The Egoist. The Egoist (1879) is one of 
the best-known novels of Mr. George Meredith, born 1828. 
It had been published only a very short time before 
Stevenson wrote this essay, so he is commenting on one 
of the "newest" books. Stevenson's enthusiasm for 
Meredith knew no bounds, and he regarded the Egoist and 
Richard Fever el (1859), as among the masterpieces of 
English literature. Daniel Deronda, the last and by no 
means the best novel of George Eliot (1820-1880), had 
appeared in 1876. 



A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 



IN anything fit to be called by the name of reading, 
the process itself should be absorbhig and volup- 
tuous ; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out 
of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our mind 
filled with the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, 
incapable of sleep or of continuous thought. The 
words, if the book be eloquent, should run thence- 
forward in our ears like the noise of breakers, and 
the story, if it be a story, repeat itself in a thousand 
coloured pictures to the eye. It was for this last 
pleasure that we read so closely, and loved our books 
so dearly, in the bright, troubled period of boyhood. 
Eloquence and thought, character and conversation, 
were but obstacles to brush aside as we dug blithely 
after a certain sort of incident, like a pig for truffles. 
For my part, I liked a story to begin with an old 
wayside inn where, ''towards the close of the year 
17—," several gentlemen in three-cocked hats were 
playing bowls. A friend of mine preferred the 
Malabar coast in a storm, with a ship beating to 
windward, and a scowling fellow of Herculean pro- 
portions striding along the beach; he, to be sure, 
was a pirate. This was further afield than my home- 
keeping fancy loved to travel, and designed alto- 

101 



102 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

gether for a larger canvas than the tales that I 
affected. Give me a highwayman and I was full to 
the brim ; a Jacobite would do, but the highwayman 
was my favourite dish. I can still hear that merry 
clatter of the hoofs along the moonlit lane; night 
and the coming of day are still related in my mind 
with the doings of John Rann or Jerry Abershaw; 
and the words ' ' postchaise, ' ' the ' ' great North road, ' ' 
''ostler," and "nag" still sound in my ears like 
poetry. One and all, at least, and each Avith his 
particular fancy, we read story-books in childhood, 
not for eloquence or character or thought, but for 
some quality of the brute incident. That quality 
was not mere bloodshed or wonder. Although each 
of these was welcome in its place, the charm for the 
sake of which we read depended on something dif- 
ferent from either. My elders used to read novels 
aloud; and I can still remember four different pas- 
sages which I heard, before I was ten, with the same 
keen and lasting pleasure. One I discovered long 
afterwards to be the admirable opening of What 
will he Do with Itf It was no wonder I was pleased 
with that. The other three still remain unidentified. 
One is a little vague ; it was about a dark, tall house 
at night, and people groping on the stairs by the 
light that escaped from the open door of a sickroom. 
In another, a lover left a ball, and went walking in 
a cool, dewy park, whence he could watch the lighted 
windows and the figures of the dancers as they 
moved. This was the most sentimental impression 
I think I had yet received, for a child is somewhat 
deaf to the sentimental. In the last, a poet, who 
had been tragically wrangling with his wife, Avalked 
forth on the sea-beach on a tempestuous night and 



A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 103 

witnessed the horrors of a wreck.^ Different as they 
are, all these early favourites have a common note— 
they have all a touch of the romantic. 

Drama is the poetry of conduct, romance the 
poetry of circumstance. The pleasure that we take 
in life is of two sorts— the active and the passive. 
Now we are conscious of a great command over our 
destiny; anon we are lifted up by circumstance, as 
by a breaking wave, and dashed we know not how 
into the future. Now we are pleased by our con- 
duct, anon merely pleased by our surroundings. 
It would be hard to say which of these modes of 
satisfaction is the more effective, but the latter is 
surely the more constant. Conduct is three parts 
of life, they say ; but I think they put it high. There 
is a vast deal in life and letters both which is not 
immoral, but simply a-moral; which either does not 
regard the human will at all, or deals with it in 
obvious and healthy relations; where the interest 
turns, not upon what a man shall choose to do, but 
on how he manages to do it; not on the passionate 
slips and hesitations of the conscience, but on the 
problems of the body and of the practical intelli- 
gence, in clean, open-air adventure, the shock of 
arms or the diplomacy of life. With such material 
as this it is impossible to build a play, for the serious 
theatre exists solely on moral grounds, and is a 
standing proof of the dissemination of the human 
conscience. But it is possible to build, upon this 
ground, the most joyous of verses, and the most 
lively, beautiful and buoyant tales. 

One thing in life calls for another ; there is a fitness 
^Sinee traced by many obliging correspondents to the gal- 
lery of Charles Kingsley, 



104 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

in events and places. The sight of a pleasant arbour 
puts it in our minds to sit there. One place suggests 
work, another idleness, a third early rising and long 
rambles in the dew. The effect of night, of any 
flowing water, of lighted cities, of the peep of day, 
of ships, of the open ocean, calls up in the mind 
an army of anonymous desires and pleasures. Some- 
thing, we feel, should happen; we know not what, 
yet we proceed in quest of it. And many of the 
happiest hours of life fleet by us in this vain attend- 
ance on the genius of the place and moment. It 
is thus that tracts of young fir, and low rocks that 
reach into deep soundings, particularly torture aud 
delight me. Something must have happened in such 
places, and perhaps ages back, to members of my 
race; when I was a child I tried in vain to invent 
appropriate games for them, as I still try, just as 
vainly, to fit them with the proper story. Some 
places speak distinctly. Certain dank gardens cry 
aloud for a murder; certain old houses demand to 
be haunted; certain coasts are set apart for ship- 
wreck. Other spots again seem to abide their destiny, 
suggestive and impenetrable, "miching mallecho." 
The inn at Burford Bridge, with its arbours and 
green garden and silent, eddying river— though it 
is known already as the place where Keats wrote 
some of his Endymion and Nelson parted from his 
Emma— still seems to wait the coming of the appro- 
priate legend. A¥ithin these ivied walls, behind 
these old green shutters, some further business 
smoulders, waiting for its hour. The old Hawes 
Inn at the Queen's Ferry makes a similar call upon 
my fancy. There it stands, apart from the town, 
beside the pier, in a climate of its own, half inland, 



A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 105 

half marine— in front, the ferry bubbling with the 
tide and the guard-ship swinging to her anchor; be- 
hind, the old garden with the trees. Americans seek 
it already for the sake of Lovel and Oldbuck, who 
dined there at the beginning of the Antiquary. But 
you need not tell me — that is not all ; there is some 
story, unrecorded or not yet complete, which must 
express the meaning of that inn more fully. So 
it is with names and faces; so it is with incidents 
that are idle and inconclusive in themselves, and 
yet seem like the beginning of some quaint romance, 
which the all-careless author leaves untold. How 
many of these romances have we not seen determine 
at their birth; how many people have met us with 
a look of meaning in their eye, and sunk at once 
into trivial acquaintances ; to how many places have 
we not drawn near, Avith express intimations— "here 
my destiny awaits me"— and we have but dined 
there and passed on! I have lived both at the 
Hawes and Burford in a perpetual flutter, on the 
heels, as it seemed, of some adventure that should 
justify the place; but though the feeling had me to 
bed at night and called me again at morning in one 
unbroken round of pleasure and suspense, nothing 
befell me in either worth remark. The man or the 
hour had not yet come; but some day, I think, a 
boat shall put off from the Queen's Ferry, fraught 
Avith a dear cargo, and some frosty night a horse- 
man, on a tragic errand, rattle with his whip upon 
the green shutters of the inn at Burford.^ 

Now, this is one of the natural appetites with 
'Since the above was written I have tried to launch the 
boat with my own hands in Kidnapped. Some day, per- 
haps, I may try a rattle at the shutters. 



106 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

which any lively literature has to count, ^he desire 
for knowledge, I had almost added the desire for 
meat, is not more deeply^ seated than this demand 
for fit and striking incident. The dullest of clowns 
tells, or tries to tell, himself a story, as the feeblest 
of children uses invention in his play; and even as 
the imaginative grown person, joining in the game, 
at once enriches it with many delightful circum- 
stances, the great creative writer shows us the real- 
isation and the apotheosis of the day-dreams of 
common men. His stories may be nourished with 
the realities of life, but their true mark is to satisfy 
the nameless longings of the reader, and to obey the 
ideal laws of the day-dream. The right kind of 
thing should fall out in the right kind of place; 
the right kind of thing should follow; and not only 
the characters talk aptly and think naturally, but 
all the circumstances in a tale answer one to another 
like notes in music. The threads of a story come 
from time to time together and make a picture in 
the web; the characters fall from time to time into 
some attitude to each other or to nature, which 
stamps the story home like an illustration. Crusoe 
recoiling from the footprint, Achilles shouting over 
against the Trojans, Ulysses bending the great bow, 
Christian running with his fingers in his ears, these 
are each culminating moments in the legend, and 
each has been printed on the mind's eye forever. 
Other things we may forget; we may forget the 
words, although they are beautiful; we may forget 
the author's comment, although perhaps it was in- 
genious and true; but these epoch-making scenes, 
which put the last mark of truth upon a story and 
fill up, at one blow, our capacity for sympathetic 



A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 107 

pleasure, we so adopt into the very bosom of our 
mind that neither time nor tide can efface or weaken 
the impression. This, then, is the plastic part of 
literature : to embody character, thought, or emotion 
in some act or attitude that shall be remarkably 
striking to the mind's eye. This is the highest and 
hardest thing to do in words; the thing which, once 
accomplished, equally delights the schoolboy and 
the sage, and makes, in its own right, the quality of 
epics. Compared with this, all other purposes in 
literature, except the purely lyrical or the purely 
philosophic, are bastard in nature, facile of execu- 
tion, and feeble in result. It is one thing to write 
about the inn at Burford, or to describe scenery 
with the word-painters ; it is quite another to seize 
on the heart of the suggestion and make a country 
famous with a legend. It is one thing to remark 
and to dissect, with the most cutting logic, the com- 
plications of life, and of the human spirit ; it is quite 
another to give them body and blood in the story of 
Ajax or of Hamlet. The first is literature, but the 
second is something besides, for it is likewise art. 

English people of the present day^ are apt, I 
know not why, to look somewhat down on incident, 
and reserve their admiration for the clink of tea- 
spoons and the accents of the curate. It is thought 
clever to write a novel with no story at all, or at 
least with a very dull one. Reduced even to the 
lowest terms, a certain interest can be communicated 
by the art of narrative; a sense of human kinship 
stirred ; and a kind of monotonous fitness, compara- 
ble to the words and air of Sandy's Mull^ preserved 

^1882. 



108 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

among the infinitesimal occurrences recorded. Some 
people work, in this manner, with even a strong 
touch. Mr. Trollope's inimitable clergymen natu- 
rally arise to the mind in this connection. But even 
Mr. Trollope does not confine himself to chronicling 
small beer. Mr. Crawley's collision with the Bishop 's 
wife, Mr. Melnette dallying in the deserted banquet- 
room, are typical incidents, epically conceived, fitly 
embodying a crisis. Or again look at Thackeray. If 
Rawdon Crawley's blow were not delivered. Vanity 
Fair would cease to be a work of art. That scene 
is the chief ganglion of the tale; and the discharge 
of energy from Rawdon 's fist is the reward and 
consolation of the reader. The end of Esmond is 
a yet wider excursion from the author's customary 
fields; the scene at Castlewood is pure Dumas; the 
great and wily English borrower has here borrowed 
from the great, unblushing French thief; as usual, 
he has borrowed admirably well, and the breaking 
of the sword rounds off the best of all his books with 
a manly, martial note. But perhaps nothing can 
more strongly illustrate the necessity for marking 
incident than to compare the living fame of Robinson 
Crusoe with the discredit of Clarissa Harlowe. Clar- 
issa is a book of a far more startling import, worked 
out, on a great canvas, with inimitable courage and 
unflagging art. It contains wit, character, passion, 
plot, conversations full of spirit and insight, letters 
sparkling with unstrained humanity; and if the 
death of the heroine be somewhat frigid and artificial, 
the last days of the hero strike the only note of what 
we now call Byronism, between the Elizabethans and 
Byron himself. And yet a little story of a ship- 
wrecked sailor, with not a tenth part of the style 



A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 109 

nor a thousandth part of the wisdom, exploring none 
of the arcana of humanity and deprived of the 
perennial interest of love, goes on from edition to 
edition, ever young, while Clarissa lies upon the 
shelves unread. A friend of mine, a Welsh black- 
smith, was twenty-five years old and could neither 
read nor write, when he heard a chapter of Robinsov 
read aloud in a farm kitchen. Up to that moment 
he had sat content, huddled in his ignorance, but 
he left that farm another man. There were day- 
dreams, it appeared, divine day-dreams, written and 
printed and bound, and to be bought for money and 
enjoyed at pleasure. Down he sat that day, pain- 
fully learned to read Welsh, and returned to borrow 
the book. It had been lost, nor could he find another 
copy but one that was in English. Down he sat once 
more, learned English, and at length, and with entire 
delight, read Kohinson. It is like the story of a love- 
chase. If he had heard a letter from Clarissa, would 
he have been fired with the same chivalrous ardour! 
I wonder. Yet Clarissa has every quality that can 
be shown in prose, one alone excepted— pictorial or 
picture-making romance. While Kohinson depends, 
for the most part and with the overwhelming major- 
ity of its readers, on the charm of circumstance. 

In the highest achievements of the art of words, 
the dramatic and the pictorial, the moral and roman- 
tic interest, rise and fall together by a common and 
organic law. Situation is animated with passion, 
passion clothed upon with situation. Neither exists 
for itself, but each inheres indissolubly with the 
other. This is high art; and not only the highest 
art possible in words, but the highest art of all, since 
it combines the greatest mass and diversity of the 



110 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

elements of truth and pleasure. Such are epics, 
and the few prose tales that have the epic weight. 
But as from a school of works, aping the creative, 
incident and romance are ruthlessly discarded, so 
may character and drama be omitted or subordinated 
to romance. There is one book, for example, more 
generally loved than Shakespeare, that captivates 
in childhood, and still delights in age— I mean the 
Arabian Nights— ^vhere you shall look in vain for 
moral or for intellectual interest. No human face 
or voice greets us among that wooden crowd of kings 
and genies, sorcerers and beggarmen. Adventure, 
on the most naked terms, furnishes forth the enter- 
tainment and is found enough. Dumas approaches 
perhaps nearest of any modern to these Arabian 
authors in the purely material charm of some of 
his romances. The early part of Monte Cristo, down 
to the finding of the treasure, is a piece of perfect 
story-telling; the man never breathed who shared 
these moving incidents without a tremor; and yet 
Faria is a thing of packthread and Dantes little 
more than a name. The sequel is one long-drawn 
error, gloomy, bloody, unnatural and dull; but as 
for these early chapters, I do not believe there is 
another volume extant where you can breathe the 
pame unmingled atmosphere of romance. It is very 
thin and light, to be sure, as on a high mountain ; 
but it is brisk and clear and sunny in proportion. I 
saw the other day, with envy, an old and a very 
clever lady setting forth on a second or third voyage 
into Monte Cristo. Here are stories which power- 
fully affect the reader, which can be reperused at 
any age, and where the characters are no more than 
puppets. The bony fist of the showman visibly 



A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 111 

propels them ; their springs are an open secret ; their 
faces are of wood, their bellies filled with bran; 
and yet we thrillingiy partake of their adventures. 
And the point may be illustrated still further. The 
last interview between Lucy and Richard Feveril 
is pure drama ; more than that, it is the strongest 
scene, since Shakespeare, in the English tongue. 
Their first meeting by the river, on the other hand, 
is pure romance ; it has nothing to do with character ; 
it might happen to any other boy and maiden, and 
be none the less delightfvil for the change. And 
yet I think he would be a bold man who should 
choose between these passages. Thus, in the same 
book, we may have two scenes, each capital in its 
order: in the one, human passion, deep calling unto 
deep, shall utter its genuine voice;' in the second, 
according circumstances, like instruments in tune, 
shall build up a trivial but desirable incident, such 
as we love to prefigure for ourselves; and in the 
end, in spite of the critics, we may hesitate to give 
the preference to either. The one may ask more 
genius— I do not say it does; but at least the other 
dwells as clearly in the memory. 

True romantic art, again, makes a romance of all 
things. It reaches into the highest abstraction of 
the ideal ; it does not refuse the most pedestrian 
realism. Robinson Crusoe is as realistic as it is 
romantic: both qualities are pushed to an ex- 
treme, and neither suffers. Nor does romance 
depend upon the material importance of the inci- 
dents. To deal with strong and deadly elements, 
banditti, pirates, war and murder, is to conjure 
with great names, and, in the event of failure, to 
double the disgrace. The arrival of Haydn and 



112 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

Consnelo at the Canon's villa is a very trifling inci- 
dent; yet "we may read a dozen boisterous stories 
from beginning to end, and not receive so fresh and 
stirring an impression of adventure. It was the 
scene of Crusoe at the wreck, if I remember rightly, 
that so bewitched my blacksmith. Nor is the fact 
surprising. Every single article the castaway re- 
covers from the hulk is ''a joy for ever" to the man 
who reads of them. They are the things that should 
be found, and the bare enumeration stirs the blood. 
I found a glimmer of the same interest the other day 
in a new book, The Sailor's Sweetheart, by Mr. Clark 
Russell. The whole business of the brig Morning 
Star is very rightly felt and spiritedly written; but 
the clothes, the books and the money satisfy the 
reader's mind like things to eat. We are dealing 
here with the old cut-and-dry legitimate interest of 
treasure trove. But even treasure trove can be made 
dull. There are few people who have not groaned 
under the plethora of goods that fell to the lot of 
the Swiss Family Robinson, that dreary family. 
They found article after article, creature after crea- 
ture, from milk kine to pieces of ordnance, a whole 
consignment; but no informing taste had presided 
over the selection, there was no smack or relish in 
the invoice; and these riches left the fancy cold. 
The box of goods in Verne's Mysterious Island is 
another case in point: there was no gusto and no 
glamour about that; it might have come from a 
shop. But the two hundred and seventy-eight Aus- 
tralian sovereigns on board the Morning Star fell 
upon me like a surprise that I had expected; whole 
vistas of secondary stories, besides the one in hand, 
radiated forth from that discovery, as they radiate 



A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 113 

from a striking particular in life; and I was made 
for the moment as happy as a reader has the right 
to be. 

To come at all at the nature of this quality of 
romance, we must bear in mind the peculiarity of 
our attitude to any art. No art produces illusion ; in 
the theatre we never forget that we are in the theatre ; 
and while we read a story, we sit wavering between 
two minds, now merely clapping our hands at the 
m^erit of the performance, now condescending to take 
an active part in fancy with the characters. This 
last is the triumph of romantic story-telling: when 
the reader consciously plays at being the hero, the 
scene is a good scene. Now in character-studies the 
pleasure that we take is critical ; we watch, we ap- 
prove, we smile at incongruities, we are moved to 
sudden heats of sympathy with courage, suffering 
or virtue. But the characters are still themselves, 
they are not us; the more clearly they are depicted, 
the more widely do they stand away from us, the 
more imperiously do they thrust us back into our 
place as a spectator. I cannot identify myself with 
Rawdon Crawley or with Eugene de Rastignac, for 
I have scarce a hope or fear in common with them. 
It is not character but incident that woos us out 
of our reserve. Something happens as we desire to 
have it happen to ourselves ; some situation, that we 
have long dallied with in fancy, is realised in the 
story with enticing and appropriate details. Then 
we forget the characters; then we push the hero 
aside ; then we plunge into the tale in our own person 
and bathe in fresh experience; and then, and then 
only, do we say we have been reading a romance. 
It is not only pleasurable things that we imagine 



114 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

in our day-dreams; there are lights in which we 
are willing to contemplate even the idea of our own 
death ; w^ays in which it seems as if it would amuse 
us to be cheated, wounded or calumniated. It is 
thus possible to construct a story, even of tragic 
import, in which every incident, detail and trick 
of circumstance shall be welcome to the reader's 
thoughts. Fiction is to the grown man what play is 
to the child; it is there that he changes the atmos- 
phere and tenor of his life; and w^hen the game so 
chimes with his fancy that he can join in it with all 
his heart, when it pleases him with every turn, when 
he loves to recall it and dwells upon its recollection 
with entire delight, fiction is called romance. 

Walter Scott is out and away the king of the 
romantics. The Lady of the Lake has no indisputable 
claim to be a poem beyond the inherent fitness and 
desirability of the tale. It is just such a story as 
a man would make up for himself, walking, in the 
best health and temper, through just such scenes 
as it is laid in. Hence it is that a charm dwells unde- 
finable among these slovenly verses, as the unseen 
cuckoo fills the mountains with his note ; hence, even 
after we have flung the book aside, the scenery and 
adventures remain present to the mind, a new and 
green possession, not unworthy of that beautiful 
name. The Lady of the Lake, or that direct, romantic 
opening,— one of the most spirited and poetical in 
literature,— ''The stag at eve had drunk his fill." 
The same strength and the same weaknesses adorn 
and disfigure the novels. In that ill-written, ragged 
book, The Pirate, the figure of Cleveland— cast up 
by the sea on the resounding foreland of Dunrossness 
— moving, with the blood on his hands and the 



A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 115 

Spanish words on his tongue, among the simple 
islanders— singing a serenade under the window of 
his Shetland mistress — is conceived in the very high- 
est manner of romantic invention. The words of 
his song, ''Through groves of palm," sung in such 
a scene and by such a lover, clench, as in a nutshell, 
the emphatic contrast upon which the tale is built. 
In Guy Mannering, again, every incident is delight- 
ful to the imagination; and the scene when Harry 
Bertram lands at Ellangowan is a model instance 
of romantic method. 

'' 'I remember the tune well,' he says, 'though I 
cannot guess what should at present so strongly recall 
it to my memory.' He took his flageolet from his 
pocket and played a simple melody. Apparently 
the tune awoke the corresponding associations of a 
damsel, , . She immediately took up the song— 

" Are these the links of Forth, she said ; 
Or are they the crooks of Dee, 
Or the bonny woods of Warroeh Head 
That I so fam would seef 

" 'By heaven!' said Bertram, 'it is the very bal- 
lad.' " 

On this quotation two remarks fall to be made. 
First, as an instance of modern feeling for romance, 
this famous touch of the flageolet and the old song 
is selected by IMiss Braddon for omission. Miss Brad- 
don's idea of a story, like Mrs. Todgers's idea of a 
wooden leg, were something strange to have ex- 
pounded. As a matter of personal experience, Meg's 
appearance to old Mr. Bertram on the road, the ruins 
of Derncleugh, the scene of the flageolet, and the 



116 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

Dominie's recognition of Harry, are the four strong 
notes that continue to ring in the mind after the 
book is laid aside. The second point is still more 
curious. The reader will observe a mark of excision 
in the passage as quoted by me. AVell, here is how 
it runs in the original : ^'a damsel, who, close behind 
a fine spring about half-way down the descent, and 
which liRd once sunnlied the castle with water, was 
engaged in bleaching linen." A man who gave in 
such copy would be discharged from tlie sUirt of a 
daily paper. Scptt has forgotten to prepare the 
reader for the presence of the "damsel"; he has 
forgotten to mention the spring and its relation to 
the ruin ; and now, face to face with his omission, 
instead of trying back and starting fair, crams all 
this matter, tail foremost, into a single shambling 
sentence. It is not merely bad English, or bad style ; 
it is abominably bad narrative besides. 

Certainly the contrast is remarkable; and it is 
one that throws a strong light upon the subject of 
this paper. For here we have a man of the finest 
creative instinct touching with perfect certainty and 
charm the romantic junctures of his story; and we 
find him utterly careless, almost, it would seem, in- 
capable, in the technical matter of style, and not 
only frequently weak, but frequently wrong in points 
of drama. In character parts, indeed, and particu- 
larly in the Scotch, he was delicate, strong and 
truthful; but the trite, obliterated features of too 
many of his heroes have already wearied two genera- 
tions of readers. At times his characters will speak 
with something far beyond propriety with a true 
heroic note ; but on the next page they will be wading 
wearily forward with an ungrammatical and un- 



A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 117 

dramatic rigmarole of words. The man who could 
conceive and write the character of Elspeth of the 
Craigburnfoot, as Scott has conceived and written it, 
had not only splendid romantic, but splendid tragic 
gifts. How comes it, then, that he could so often 
fob us off with languid, inarticulate twaddle 1 

It seems to me that the explanation is to be found 
in the very quality of his surprising merits. As his 
books are play to the reader, so were they play to 
him. He conjured up the romantic with delight, 
but he had hardly patience to describe it. He was 
a great day-dreamer, a seer of fit and beautiful and 
humorous visions, but hardly a great artist ; hardly, 
in the manful sense, an artist at all. He pleased 
himself, and so he pleases us. Of the pleasures of 
his art he tasted fully; but of its toils and vigils 
and distresses never man knew less. A great roman- 
tic—an idle child. 



NOTES 



THIS essay first appeared in Longman's Magazine for 
November 1882, Vol. I, pp. 69-79. Five years later it 
was published in the volume Memories and Portraits (1887), 
followed by an article called A Humble Remonstrance, 
which should really be read in connection with this essay, 
as it is a continuation of the same line of thought. In 
the eternal conflict between Romanticism and Realism, 
Stevenson was heart and soul with the former, and fortu- 
nately he lived long enough to see the practical effects of 
his own precepts and influence. When he began to write, 
Realism in fiction seemed to have absolute control; when 
he died, a tremendous reaction in favor of the historical 
romance had already set in, that reached its climax with 
the death of the century. Stevenson's share in this 
Romantic revival was greater than that of any other 
English writer, and as an English review remarked, if 
it had not been for him most of the new authors would 
have been Howells and James young men. 

This paper was written at Davos in the winter of 1881-2, 
and in February, writing to Henley, the author said, "I 
have just finished a paper, 'A Gossip on Romance,' in 
which I have tried to do, very popularly, about one-half 
of the matter you wanted me to try. In a way, I have 
found an answer to the question. But the subject was 
hardly fit for so chatty a paper, and it is all loose ends. 
If ever I do my book on the Art of Literature, I shall 
gather them together and be clear." (Letters, I, 269). 
On Dec. 8, 1884— the same month in which A Humble 
Remonstrance was printed, Stevenson wrote an interesting 



NOTES 119 

letter to Henry James, whose views on the art of fiction 
were naturally contrary to those of his friend. See Letters, 
1, 402. 

Page 101. Like a pig for truffles. See the Epilogue 
to Browning's Pacchiarotto etc., Stanza XVIII:— "Your 
product is— truffles, you hunt with a pig!" 

Page 101. The Malabar coast. A part of India. 

Page 102. Jacobite. After James II was driven from 
the throne in 1688, his supporters and those of his de- 
scendants were called Jacobites. Jacobus is the Latin for 
James. 

Page 102. John Rann or Jerry Abershaw. John Rann 
I cannot find. Louis Jeremiah (or Jerry) Abershaw was 
a highway robber, who infested the roads near London; 
he was hung in 1795, when scarcely over twenty-one years 
old. 

Page 102. ''Great North road.'^ The road that runs on 
the east of England up to Edinburgh. Stevenson yielded 
to the charm that these words had for him, for he began 
a romance with the title, The Great North Road, which 
however, he never finished. It was published as a fragment 
in The Illustrated London News, in 1895. 

Page 102. What will he Do with It f One of Bulwer- 
Lytton's novels, published in 1858. 

Page 103. Conduct is three parts of life. In Literature 
and Dogma (1873) Matthew Arnold asserted with great 
emphasis, that conduct was three-fourths of life. 

Page 104. The sight of a pleasant arbour. Possibly a 
reminiscence of the arbour in Pilgrim's Progress, where 
Christian fell asleep, and lost his roll. "Now about the 
midway to the top of the hill was a pleasant arbour." 

Page 104. "Miching mallecho." Hamlefs description of 
the meaning of the Dumb Show in the play-scene. Act III, 
Sc. 2. "Hidden treachery"— see any annotated edition 
of Hamlet. 

Page 104. Burford Bridge . . . Keats . . . Endymion . . . 
Nelson ... Emma .. .the old Hawes Inn at the Queen's 



120 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

Ferry. Burford Bridge is close to Dorking in Surrey, 
England: in the old inn, Keats wrote a part of his poem 
Endymion (published 1818). The room where he com- 
posed is still on exhibition. Two letters by Keats, 
which are exceedingly important to the student of his art 
as a poet, were written from Burford Bridge in November 
1817. See Colvin's edition of Keats's Letters, pp. 40-46. 
. . . "Emma" is Lady Hamilton, whom Admiral Nelson 
loved. . . . Queen's Ferry (properly Queens ferry) is on the 
Firth of Forth, Scotland. See a few lines below in the 
text, where Stevenson gives the reference to the opening 
pages of Scott's novel the Antiquary, which begins in the 
old inn at this place. See also page 105 of the text, and 
Stevenson's foot note, where he declares that he did make 
use of Queensferry in his novel Kidnapped (1886) (Chap- 
ter XXVI). 

Page 106. Crusoe . . . Achilles . . . Ulysses , . . Christian. 
When Robinson Crusoe saw the footprint on the sand, and 
realised he was not alone. ... To a reader of to-day the 
great hero Achilles seems to be all bluster and selfish 
childishness ; the true gentleman of the Iliad is Hector. . . . 
When Ulysses returned home in the Odyssey, he bent with 
ease the bow that had proved too much for all the suitors 
of his lonely and faithful wife Penelope. . . Christian 
"had not run far from his own door when his wife and 
children, perceiving it, began to cry after him to return; 
but the man put his fingers in his ears and ran on 
crying, 'Life ! Life ! eternal Life !' "—Pilgrim's Progress. 

Page 107. Ajax. The Greek heavy-weight in Homer's 
Iliad. 

Page 107. English people of the present day. This was 
absolutely true in 1882. But in 1892 a complete revolution 
in taste had set in, and many of the most hardened realists 
were forced to write wild romances, or lose their grip on 
the public. At this time, Stevenson naturally had no idea 
how powerfully his as yet un^vritten romances were to 
affect the literary market. 



NOTES 121 

Pag:e 108. Mr. Trollope's . . . chronicling small beer . . . 
Rawdon Crawley's blow. Anthony Trollope (1815-1882) 
wrote an immense number of mildly entertaining novels 
concerned with the lives and ambitions of English clergy- 
men aild their satellites. His best-knoAvn book is probably 
Barchester Towers (1857). ... Chronicling small beer is 
the "lame and impotent conclnsion" with Avhieh lago 
finishes his poem (Othello, Act II, Sc. I). ... Raivdon 
Crawley's blow refers to the most memorable scene in 
Thackeray's great novel, Vanity Fair (1847-8), where 
Rawdon Crawley, the husband of Becky Sharp, 
strikes Lord Steyne in the face (Chap. LIII). After 
writing this powerful scene, Thackeray was in a state of 
tremendous excitement, and slapping his knee, said, "That's 
Genius !" 

Page 108. The end of Esmond . . . pure Dumas. Thack- 
eray's romance Henry Esmond (1852) is regarded by many 
critics as the greatest work of fiction in tlie English 
language; Stevenson here calls it "the best of all his 
books." The scene Stevenson refers to is where Henry is 
finally cured of his love for Beatrix, and theatrically breaks 
his sword in the presence of he ijroyal admirer (Book III, 
Chap. 13). Alexander Dumas j (1303-1370), author of 
Monte Crista and Les Trois Mousquetaires. Stevenson 
playfully calls him "the great, unblushing French thief"; 
all he means is that Dumas never hesitated to appropriate 
material wherever he found it^ and work it into his 
romances. 

Page 108. The living fame of Robinson Crusoe with the 
discredit of Clarissa Harlowe. A strong contrast between 
the romance of incident and the analytical novel. For 
remarks on Clarissa, see our note, page 91. 

Page 108. Byronism. About the time Lord Byron was 
publishing Childe Harold (1812-1818) a tremendous wave 
of romantic melancholy swept over all the countries of 
Europe. Innumerable poems and romances dealing with 
mysteriously-sad heroes were written in imitation of 



122 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

Byron; and young authors wore low, rolling collars, and 
tried to look depressed. See Gautier's Histoire du 
Romantisme. Now the death of Lovelace (in a duel) in 
Richardson's Clarissa, was pitched in exactly the Byronic 
key, though at that time Byron had not been born ... The 
Elizabethans were of course thoroughly romantic. 

Page 110. Faria . . . Dantes. Characters in Dumas's 
Monte Cristo (1841-5). 

Page 111. Lucy and Richard Feveril. Usually spelled 
"Feverel." Stevenson strangely enough, was always a bad 
speller. The reference here is to one of Stevenson's 
favorite novels The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859) by 
George Meredith. Stevenson's idolatrous praise of this 
particular scene in the novel is curious, for no gTeater 
contrast in English literary style can be found than that 
between Meredith's and his own. For another reference 
by Stevenson to the older novelist, see our note, page 100. 

Page 111. Robinson Crusoe is as realistic as it is 
romantic. Therein lies precisely the charm of this book 
for boyish minds; the details are given with such candour 
that it seems as if they must all be true. At heart, Defoe 
was an intense realist, as well as the first English novelist. 

Page 111. The arrival of Haydn. For a note on George 
Sand's novel Consuelo see page 91. 

Page 112. A joy forever. The first line of Keats's poem 
Endymion is "A thing of beauty is a joy forever." 

Page 112. The Sailor's Sweetheart. Mr. W. Clark 
Russell, born in New York in 1844, has written many 
popular tales of the sea. His first success was The Wreck 
of the Grosvenor (1876) ; The Sailor's Sweetheart, more 
properly, A Sailor's Sweetheart, was published in 1877. 

Page 112. Swiss Family Robinson. A German story, 
Der schioeizerische Robinson (1812) by J. D. Wyss (1743- 
1818). This story is not so popular as it used to be. 

Page 112. Verne's Mysterious Island. Jules Verne, who 
died at Amiens, France, in 1904, wrote an immense number 
of romances, which, translated into many languages, have 



NOTES 123 

delighted young readers all over the world. The Myste- 
rious Island is a sequel to Twenty Thousand Leagues under 
the Sea. 

Page 113. Eugene de Rastignac. A character in Bal- 
zac's novel, Pere Goriot. 

Page 114. The Lady of the Lake. This poem, published 
in 1810, is as Stevenson implies, not so much a poem as a 
rattling good story told in rime. 

Page 114. The Pirate. A novel by Scott, published in 
1S21. It was the cause of Cooper's writing The Pilot. 
See Cooper's preface to the latter novel. 

Page 115. Guy Mannering. Also by Scott. Published 
1815. 

Page 1]5. Miss Braddon's idea. Mary Elizabeth Brad- 
don (Maxwell), born in 1837, published her first novel. 
The Trail of the Serpent, in 1860. She has written a large 
number of sensational works of fiction, very popular with 
an uncritical class of readers. Perhaps her best-known 
book is Lady Audley's Secret (1862). It would be well for 
the student to refer to the scenes in Guy Mannering 
which Stevenson calls the "Four strong notes." 

Page 115. Mrs. Todgers's idea of a wooden leg. Mrs. 
Todgers is a character in Dickens's novel, Martin Chuzzle- 
wit (1843-4). 

Page 117. Elspeth of the Craigburnfoot. A character 
in the Antiquary (1816). 



yi 
THE CHARACTER OF DOGS 



THE civilisation, the manners, and the morals 
of dog-kind are to a great extent subordinated 
to those of his ancestral master, man. This animal, 
in many ways so superior, has accepted a position of 
inferiority, shares the domestic life, and humours 
the caprices of the tyrant. But the potentate, like 
the British in India, pays small regard to the char- 
acter of his willing client, judges him with listless 
glances, and condemns him in a byword. Listless 
have been the looks of his admirers, who have ex- 
hausted idle terms of praise, and buried the poor 
soul below exaggerations. And yet more idle and, 
if possible, more unintelligent has been the attitude 
of his express detractors; those who are very fond 
of dogs ''but in their proper place"; who say "poo' 
fellow, poo' fellow," and are themselves far poorer; 
who whet the knife of the vivisectionist or heat his 
oven; who are not ashamed to admire "the creature's 
instinct ' ' ; and flying far beyond folly, have dared 
to resuscitate the theory of animal machines. The 
"dog's instinct" and the "automaton-dog," in this 
age of psychology and science, sound like strange 
anachronisms. An automaton he certainly is; a 
machine working independently of his control, the 

125 



126 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

heart like the mill-wheel, keeping all in motion, and 
the consciousness, like a person shut in the mill 
garret, enjoying the view out of the window and 
shaken by the thunder of the stones; an automaton 
in one corner of which a living spirit is confined : an 
automaton like man. Instinct again he certainly 
possesses. Inherited aptitudes are his, inherited 
frailties. Some things he at once views and under- 
stands, as though he were awakened from a sleep, 
as though he came 'trailing clouds of glory." But 
with him, as with man, the field of instinct is limited ; 
its utterances are obscure and occasional; and about 
the far larger part of life both the dog and his 
master must conduct their steps by deduction and 
observation. 

The leading distinction between dog and man, after 
and perhaps before the different duration of their 
lives, is that the one can speak and that the other 
cannot. The absence of the power of speech confines 
the dog in the development of his intellect. It hin- 
ders him from many speculations, for words are the 
beginning of metaphysic. At the same blow it saves 
him from many superstitions, and his silence has 
won for him a higher name for virtue than his 
conduct justifies. The faults of the dog are many. 
He is vainer than man, singularly greedy of notice, 
singularly intolerant of ridicule, suspicious like the 
deaf, jealous to the degree of frenzy, and radically 
devoid of truth. The day of an intelligent small 
dog is passed in the manufacture and the laborious 
communication of falsehood ; he lies with his tail, 
he lies Avith his eye, he lies with his protesting paw ; 
and when he rattles his dish or scratches at the door 
his purpose is other than appears. But he has some 



THE CHARACTER OP DOGS 127 

apology to offer for the vice. Many of the signs 
which form his dialect have come to bear an arbi- 
trary meaning, clearly understood both by his master 
and himself; yet when a new want arises he must 
either invent a new vehicle of meaning or wrest 
an old one to a different purpose ; and this necessity 
frequently recurring must tend to lessen his idea 
of the sanctity of symbols. Meanwhile the dog is 
clear in his own conscience, and draws, with a human 
nicety, the distinction between formal and essential 
truth. Of his punning perversions, his legitimate 
dexterity with symbols, he is even vain; but when 
he has told and been detected in a lie, there is not 
a hair upon his body but confesses guilt. To a dog of 
gentlemanly feeling theft and falsehood are dis- 
graceful vices. The canine, like the human, gentle- 
man demands in his misdemeanours Montaigne's 
^'je ne sais quoi de genereux.'' He is never more 
than half ashamed of having barked or bitten ; and 
for those faulcs into which he has been led by the 
desire to shine before a lady of his race, he retains, 
even under physical correction, a share of pride. 
But to be caught lying, if he understands it, in- 
stantly uncurls his fleece. 

Just as among dull observers he preserves a name 
for truth, the dog has been credited with modesty. 
It is amazing how the use of language blunts the 
faculties of man— that because vainglory flnds no 
vent in words, creatures supplied with eyes have 
been unable to detect a fault so gross and obvious. 
If a small spoiled dog were suddenly to be endowed 
with speech, he would prate interminably, and still 
about himself; when we had friends, we should be 
forced to lock him in a garret; and what with his 



128 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

whining jealousies and his foible for falsehood, in a 
a year's time he would have gone far to weary out 
our love. I was about to compare him to Sir Wil- 
loug'hby Patterne, but the Patternes have a manlier 
sense of their own merits ; and the parallel, besides, 
is ready. Hans Christian Andersen, as we behold 
him in his startling memoirs, thrilling from top to 
toe with an excruciating vanity, and scouting even 
along the street for shadows of offence— here was 
the talking dog. 

It is just this rage for consideration that has 
betrayed the dog into his satellite position as the 
friend of man. The cat, an animal of franker appe- 
tites, preserves his independence. But the dog, with 
one eye ever on the audience, has been wheedled into 
slavery, and praised and patted into the renunciation 
of his nature. Once he ceased hunting and be- 
came man's plate-licker, the Rubicon was crossed. 
Thenceforth he was a gentleman of leisure ; and ex- 
cept the few whom we keep working, the whole race 
grew more and more self-conscious, mannered and 
affected. The number of things that a small dog 
does naturally is strangely small. Enjoying better 
spirits and not crushed under material cares, he is 
far more theatrical than average man. His whole 
life, if he be a dog of any pretension to gallantry, 
is spent in a vain show, and in the hot pursuit of 
admiration. Take out your puppy for a walk, and 
you will find the little ball of fur clumsy, stupid, 
bewildered, but natural. Let but a few months pass, 
and when you repeat the process you will find nature 
buried in convention. He will do nothing plainly; 
but the simplest processes of our material life will 
all be bent into the forms of an elaborate and mys- 



THE CHARACTER OF DOGS 129 

terious etiquette. Instinct, says the fool, has awak- 
ened. But it is not so. Some dogs— some, at the very 
least— if they be kept separate from others, remain 
quite natural; and these, when at length they meet 
with a companion of experience, and have the game 
explained to them, distinguish themselves by the 
severity of their devotion to its rules. I w4sh I were 
allowed to tell a story which would radiantly illu- 
minate the point; but men, like dogs, have an 
elaborate and mysterious etiquette. It is their bond 
of sympathy that both are the children of conven- 
tion. 

The person, man or dog, who has a conscience is 
eternally condemned to some degree of humbug ; the 
sense of the law in their members fatally precipitates 
either towards a frozen and affected bearing. And 
the converse is true; and in the elaborate and con- 
scious manners of the dog, moral opinions and the 
love of the ideal stand confessed. To follow for ten 
minutes in the street some swaggering, canine caval- 
ier, is to receive a lesson in dramatic art and the cul- 
tured conduct of the body; in every act and ges- 
ture you see him true to a refined conception ; and the 
dullest cur, beholding him, pricks up his ear and 
proceeds to imitate and parody that charming ease. 
For to be a high-mannered and high-minded gentle- 
man, careless, affable, and gay, is the inborn pre- 
tension of the dog. The large dog, so much lazier, 
so much more weighed upon with matter, so majestic 
in repose, so beautiful in effort, is born with the 
dramatic means to wholly represent the part. And 
it is more pathetic and perhaps more instructive to 
consider the small dog in his conscientious and im- 
perfect efforts to outdo Sir Philip Sidney. For the 



130 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

ideal of the dog is feudal and religious; the ever- 
present polytheism, the whip-bearing Olympus of 
mankind, rules them on the one hand; on the other, 
their singular difference of size and strength among 
themselves effectually prevents the appearance of 
the democratic notion. Or we might more exactly 
compare their society to the curious spectacle pre- 
sented by a school— ushers, monitors, and big and 
little boys— qualified by one circumstance, the intro- 
duction of the other sex. In each, we should observe 
a somewhat similar tension of manner, and some- 
what similar points of honour. In each the larger 
animal keeps a contemptuous good humour; in each 
the smaller annoys him with wasp-like impudence, 
certain of practical immunity; in each we shall find 
a double life producing double characters, and an 
excursive and noisy heroism combined with a fair 
amount of practical timidity. I have known dogs,. 
and I have known school heroes that, set aside the 
fur, could hardly have been told apart ; and if we 
desire to understand the chivalry of old, we must 
turn to the school playfields or the dungheap where 
the dogs are trooping. 

Woman, with the dog, has been long enfranchised. 
Incessant massacre of female innocents has changed 
the proportions of the sexes and perverted their 
relations. Thus, when we regard the manners of 
the dog, we see a romantic and monogamous animal, 
once perhaps as delicate as the cat, at war with im- 
possible conditions. Man has much to answer for: 
and the part he plays is yet more damnable and 
parlous than Corin 's in the eyes of Touchstone. But 
his intervention has at least created an imperial 
situation for the rare surviving ladies. In that 



THE CHARACTER OF DOGS 131 

society they reign without a rival : conscious queens ; 
and in the only instance of a canine wife-beater that 
has ever fallen under my notice, the criminal was 
somewhat excused by the circumstances of his story. 
He is a little, very alert, well-bred, intelligent Skye, 
as black as a hat, with a wet bramble for a nose 
and two cairn-gorms for eyes. To the human ob- 
server, he is decidedly well-looking ; but to the ladies 
of his race he seems abhorrent. A thorough elaborate 
gentleman, of the plume and sword-knot order, he 
was born with the nice sense of gallantry to women. 
He took at their hands the most outrageous treat- 
ment ; I have heard him bleating like a sheep, I have 
seen him streaming blood, and his ear tattered 
like a regimental banner; and yet he would scorn 
to make reprisals. Nay more, when a human lady 
upraised the contumelious whip against the very 
dame who had been so cruelly misusing him, my 
little great-heart gave but one hoarse cry and fell 
upon the tyrant tooth and nail. This is the tale of 
a soul's tragedy. After three years of unavailing 
chivalry, he suddenly, in one hour, threw off the 
yoke of obligation; had he been Shakespeare he 
would then have written Troilus and Cressida to 
brand the offending sex ; but being only a little dog, 
he began to bite them. The surprise of the ladies 
whom he attacked indicated the monstrosity of his 
offence; but he had fairly beaten off his better 
angel, fairly committed moral suicide; for almost 
in the same hour, throwing aside the last rags of 
decency, he proceeded to attack the aged also. The 
fact is worth remark, showing as it does, that ethical 
laws are common both to dogs and men; and that 
with both a sinsrle deliberate violation of the con- 



132 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

science loosens all. ''But while the lamp holds on 
to burn," says the paraphrase, "the greatest sinner 
may return." I have been cheered to see symptoms 
of effectual penitence in my sweet ruffian; and by 
the handling that he accepted uncomplainingly the 
other day from an indignant fair one, I begin to 
hope the period of Sturm und Drang is closed. 

All these little gentlemen are subtle casuists. The 
duty to the female dog is plain ; but where competing 
duties rise, down they will sit and study them out 
like Jesuit confessors. I knew another little Skye, 
somewhat plain in manner and appearance, but a 
creature compact of amiability and solid wisdom. 
His family going abroad for a winter, he was re- 
ceived for that period by an uncle in the same city. 
The winter over, his own family home again, and 
his own house (of which he was very proud) re- 
opened, he found himself in a dilemma between two 
conflicting duties of loyalty and gratitude. His old 
friends were not to be neglected, but it seemed hardly 
decent to desert the new. This was how he solved 
the problem. Every morning, as soon. as the door 
was opened, off posted Coolin to his uncle's, visited 
the children in the nursery, saluted the whole f amil}', 
and was back at home in time for breakfast and his 
bit of fish. Nor Avas this done without a sacrifice on 
his part, sharply felt; for he had to forego the 
particular honour and jewel of his day— his morn- 
ing's walk with my father. And perhaps, from this 
cause, he gradually wearied of and relaxed the prac- 
tice, and at length returned entirely to his ancient 
habits. But the same decision served him in another 
and more distressing case of divided duty, which 
happened not long after. He was not at all a kitchen 
dog, but the cook had nurssd him with unusual 



THE CHARACTER OF DOGS 133 

kindness during the distemper; and though he did 
not adore her as he adored my father —although 
(born snob) he was critically conscious of her posi 
tion as. "only a servant"— he still cherished for her 
a special gratitude. Well, the cook left, and retired 
some streets away to lodgings of her own ; and there 
was Coolin in precisely the same situation with any 
•young gentleman who has had the inestimable benefit 
of a faithful nurse. The canine conscience did not 
solve the problem with a pound of tea at Christmas. 
No longer content to pay a flying visit, it was the 
whole forenoon that he dedicated to his solitary 
friend. And so, day by day, he continued to com.- 
fort her solitude until (for some reason which I 
could never understand and cannot approve) he 
was kept locked up to break him of the 
graceful habit. Here, it is not the similarity, 
it is the difference, that is worthy of remark; the 
clearly marked degrees of gratitude and the pro- 
portional duration of his visits. Anything further 
removed from instinct it were hard to fancy; and 
one is even stirred to a certain impatience with a 
character so destitute of spontaneity, so passionless 
in justice, and so priggishly obedient to the voice of 
reason. 

There are not many dogs like this good Coolin. 
and not many people. But the type is one well 
marked, both in the human and the canine family. 
Gallantry was not his aim, but a solid and some- 
what oppressive respectability. He was a sworn 
foe to the unusual and the conspicuous, a praiser 
of the golden mean, a kind of city "uncle modified 
by Cheeryble. And as he was precise and conscien- 
tious in all the steps of his own blameless course, 
he looked for the same precision and an even greater 



134 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

gravity in the bearing of his deity, my father. It 
was no sinecure to be Coolin 's idol ; he was exacting 
like a rigid parent; and at every sign of levity in 
the man whom he respected, he announced loudly 
the death of virtue and the proximate fall of the 
pillars of the earth. 

I have called him a snob; but all dogs are so, 
1 hough in varying degrees. It is hard to follow theif 
snobbery among themselves; for though I think we 
can perceive distinctions of rank, we cannot grasp 
what is the criterion. Thus in Edinburgh, in a 
good part of the town, there were several distinct 
societies or clubs that met in the morning to — the 
phrase is technical — to "rake the backets" in a troop. 
A friend of mine, the master of three dogs, was one 
day surprised to observe that they had left one club 
and joined another; but whether it was a rise or a 
fall, and the result of an invitation or an expulsion, 
was more than he could guess. And this illustrates 
pointedly our ignorance of the real life of dogs, 
their social ambitions and their social hierarchies. 
At least, in their dealings with men they are not 
only conscious of sex, but of the difference of station. 
And that in the most snobbish manner ; for the poor 
man's dog is not offended by the notice of the rich, 
and keeps all his ugly feeling for those poorer or 
more ragged than his master. And again, for every 
station they have an ideal of behaviour, to which 
the master, under pain of derogation, will do wisely 
to conform. How often has not a cold glance of an 
eye informed me that my dog was disappointed ; 
and how much more gladly would he not have taken 
a beating than to be thus wounded in the seat of 
piety ! 

I knew one disrespectable dog. He was far liker a 



THE CHARACTER OP DOGS 135 

cat; cared little or nothing for men, with whom he 
merely coexisted as we do with cattle, and was 
entirely devoted to the art of poaching. A house 
would not hold him, and to live in a town was what 
he refused. He led, I believe, a life of troubled 
but genuine pleasure, and perished beyond all ques- 
tion in a trap. But this was an exception, a marked 
leversion to the ancestral type ; like the hairy human 
infant. The true dog of the nineteenth century, 
to judge by the remainder of my fairly large ac- 
quaintance, is in love with respectability. A street- 
dog was once adopted by a lady. While still an 
Arab, he had done as Arabs do, gambolling in the 
mud, charging into butchers' stalls, a cat-hunter, a 
sturdy beggar, a common rogue and vagabond; but 
with his rise into society he laid aside these incon- 
sistent pleasures. He stole no more, he hunted no 
more cats; and conscious of his collar he ignored 
his old companions. Yet the canine upper class 
was never brought to recognize the upstart, and 
from that hour, except for human countenance, he 
was alone. Friendless, shorn of his sports and the 
habits of a lifetime, he still lived in a glory of happi- 
ness, content with his acquired respectability, and 
with no care but to support it solemnly. Are we 
to condemn or praise this self-made dog ! We praise 
his human brother. And thus to conquer vicious ♦- 
habits is as rare with dogs as with men. With the 
more part, for all their scruple-mongering and moral 
thought, the vices that are born with them remain 
invincible throughout; and they live all their years, 
glorying in their virtues, but still the slaves of their 
defects. Thus the sage Coolin was a thief to the 
last ; among a thousand peccadilloes, a whole goose 
and a whole cold leg of mutton lay upon his con- 



136 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

science; but Woggs/ whose soul's shipwreck in the 
matter of gallantry I have recounted above, has only 
twice been known to steal, and has often nobly con- 
quered the temptation. The eighth is his favourite 
commandment. There is something painfully human 
in these unequal virtues and mortal frailties of the 
best. Still more painful is the bearing of those 
'^ stammering professors" in the house of sickness 
and under the terror of death. It is beyond a doubt 
to me that, somehow or other, the dog connects to- 
gether, or confounds, the uneasiness of sickness and 
the consciousness of guilt. To the pains of the body 
he often adds the tortures of the conscience; and at 
these times his haggard protestations form, in re- 
gard to the human deathbed, a dreadful parody or 
parallel. 

I once supposed that I had found an inverse 
relation between the double etiquette which dogs 
obey; and that those who were most addicted to 
the showy street life among other dogs were less 
careful in the practice of home virtues for the 
tyrant man. But the female dog, that mass of car- 
neying affectations, shines equally in either sphere; 
rules her rough posse of attendant swains with un- 
wearying tact and gusto; and with her master and 
mistress pushes the arts of insinuation to their 
crowning point. The attention of man and the 
regard of other dogs flatter (it would thus appear) 

^ Walter, Watty, Woggy, Woggs, Wog, and lastly Bogue ; 
under whieh last name he fell in battle some twelve months 
ago. Glory was his aim and he attained it; for his icon, by 
the hand of Caldecott, now lies among the treasures of the 
nation. 



THE CHARACTER OF DOGS 137 

the same sensibility; but perhaps, if we could read 
the canine heart, they would be found to flatter it 
in very marked degrees. Dogs live with man as cour- 
tiers round a monarch, steeped in the flattery of 
his notice and enriched with, sinecures. To push 
their favour in this world of pickings and caresses 
is, perhaps, the business of their lives; and their 
joys may lie outside. I am in despair at our 
persistent ignorance. I read in the lives of our com- 
panions the same processes of reason, the same an- 
tique and fatal conflicts of the right against the 
wrong, and of unbitted nature with too rigid custom ; 
I see them with our weaknesses, vain, false, incon- 
stant against appetite, and with our one stalk of 
virtue, devoted to the dream of an ideal; and yet, 
as they hurry by me on the street with tail in air, 
or come singly to solicit my regard, I must own the 
secret purport of their lives is still inscrutable to 
man. Is man the friend, or is he the patron only? 
Have they indeed forgotten nature's voice? or are 
those moments snatched from courtiership when they 
touch noses with the tinker's mongrel, the brief 
reward and pleasure of their artificial lives ? Doubt- 
less, when man shares with his dog the toils of a 
profession and the pleasures of an art, as with the 
shepherd or the poacher, the affection warms and 
strengthens till it fills the soul. But doubtless, also, 
the masters are, in many cases, the object of a merely 
interested cultus, sitting aloft like Louis Quatorze, 
giving and receiving flattery and favour; and the 
dogs, like the majority of men, have but forgotten 
their true existence and become the dupes of their 
ambition. 



NOTES 



rflHIS article originallj'^ appeared in The English Illus- 
X trated Magazine for May 1883, Vol. I, pp. 300-305. 
It was accompanied with illustrations by Randolph Calde- 
cott. The essay was later included in the volume Memories 
and Portraits (1887). 

The astonishing fidelity and devotion of the dog to his 
master have certainly been in part repaid by men of 
letters in all times. A valuable essay might be written on 
the Dog's Place in Literature; in the poetiy of the East, 
hundreds of years before Christ, the dog's faithfulness 
was more than once celebrated. One of the most marvel- 
lous passages in Homer's Odyssey is the recognition of 
the ragged Ulysses by the noble old dog, Avho dies of joy. 
In recent years, since the publication of Dr. John Brown's 
Bab and his Friends (1858), the dog has approached an 
apotheosis. Among innumerable sketches and stories with 
canine heroes may be mentioned Bret Harte's extraordinary 
portrait of Boonder: M. Maeterlinck's essay on dogs: 
Richard Harding Davis's The Bar Sinister : Jack London's 
The Call of the Wild: and best of all, Alfred Ollivant's 
splendid story Boh, Son of Battle (1898) which has 
every indication of becoming an English classic. It is a 
pity that dogs cannot read. 

Page 125. The morals of dog-kind. Stevenson discusses 
this subject again in his essay Pulvis et TJmhra (1888). 

Page 125. Who whet the knife of the vivisectionist or 
heat his oven. Stevenson was so sympathetic by nature 
that once, seeing a man beating a dog, he interfered, cry- 
ing, "It's not your dog, it's God's dog." On the subject 
of vivisection, however his biographer says: "It must 

138 



NOTES 139 

be laid to the credit of his reason and the firm balance 
of his judgment that although vivisection was a subject 
he could not endure even to have mentioned, yet, with all 
his imagination and sensibility, he never ranged himself 
among the opponents of this method of inquiry, provided, 
of course, it was limited, as in England, with the utmost 
rigour possible."— Balfour's Life, II, 217. The two most 
powerful opponents of vivisection among Stevenson's 
contemporaries were Ruskin and Browning. The former 
resigned the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford because 
vivisection was permitted at the University : and the latter 
in two poems Tray and Arcades Amho treated the vivi- 
sectionists with contempt, implying that they were cowards. 
In Bernard Shaw's clever novel Cashel Byron's Profession, 
the prize-fighter maintains that his profession is more 
honorable than that of a man who bakes dogs in an oven. 
This novel, by the way, which he read in the winter of 
1887-88, made an extraordinary impression on Stevenson; 
he recognised its author's originality and cleverness im- 
mediately, and was filled with curiosity as to what kind 
of person this Shaw might be. "Tell me more of the 
inimitable author," he cried. It is a pity that Stevenson 
did not live to see the vogue of Shaw as a dramatist, for 
the latter's early novels produced practically no impression 
on the public. See Stevenson's highly entertaining letter 
to William Archer, Letters, II, 107. 

Page 126. ^'Trailing clouds of glory." Seen note, page 
60. 

Page 126. The leading distinction. Those who know 
dogs will fully agree with Stevenson here. 

Page 126. The faults of the dog. All lovers of dogs 
will by no means agree with Stevenson in his enumeration 
of canine sins. 

Page 127. Montaigne's "je ne sais quoi de genereux." 
A bit of generosity. Montaigne's Essays (1580) had an 
enormous influence on Stevenson, as they have had on 
nearly all literary men for three hundred years. See his 



140 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

article in this volume, Books Which Have Influenced Me, 
and the discussion of the "personal essay" in our general 
Introduction. 

Page 128. Sir Willoughhy Patterne. Again a character 
in Meredith's Egoist. See page 100. 

Page 128. Hans Christian Andersen. A Danish writer 
of prodigious popularity: bom 1805, died 1875. His 
books were translated into many languages. The "mem- 
oirs" Stevenson refers to, were called The Story 
of My Life, in which the author brought the narrative 
only so far as 1847: it was, however, finished by another 
hand. He is well known to juvenile readers by his Stories 
for Children. 

Page 128. Once he ceased hijinting and became man's 
plate-licker, the Rubicon was crossed. For a reversion to 
type, where the plate-licker goes back to hunting, see Mr. 
London's powerful story. The Call of the Wild. . . . The 
"Rubicon" was a small stream separating Cisalpine Gaul 
from Italy. Caesar crossed it in 49 B. C, thus taking 
a decisive step in deliberately advancing into Italy. 
"Plutarch, in his life of Caesar, makes quite a dramatic 
scene out of the crossing of the Rubicon. Caesar does not 
even mention it."— B. Perrin's ed. of Caesar's Civil War, 
p. 142. 

Page 129. The law in their members. Romans, VII, 23. 
"But I see another law in my members." 

Page 129. Sir Philip Sidney. The stainless Knight of 
Elizabeth's Court, born 1554, died 1586. The pages of 
history afford no better illustration of the "gentleman a)id 
the scholar." Poet, romancer, critic, courtier, soldier, his 
beautiful life was crowned by a noble death. 

Page 130. The ideal of the dog is feudal and religious. 
Maeterlinck says the dog is the only being who has found 
and is absolutely sure of his God. 

Page 130. Damnable and parlous than Corin's in the 
eyes of Touchstone. See As You Like It, Act III, Sc. 2. 
"Sin is damnation : Thoxi art in a parlous state, shepherd.'' 



NOTES 141 

Page 131. Cairngorms. Brown or yellow quartz, found 
in the mountain of Cairngorm, Scotland, over 4000 feet 
high. Stevenson's own dog, "Woggs" or "Bogue," was a 
black Skye terrier, whom the author seems here to have 
in mind. See note, below, "Woggs." 

Page 131. A Soul's Tragedy. The title of a tragedy by 
Browning, published in 1846. 

Page 131. Troilus and Cressida. One of the most bitter 
and cynical plays ever written; practically never seen 
on the English stage, it was successfully revived at 
Berlin, in September 1904. 

Page 132. ^^ While the lamp holds on to burn . . . the 
greatest sinner may return.'' From a hymn by Isaac 
Watts (1674-1748), beginning 

"Life is the time to serve the Lord, 
The time to insure the great reward; 
And while the lamp holds out to burn, 
The vilest sinner may return." 

Although this stanza has no remarkable merit, many 
of Watts's hymns are genuine poetry. 

Page 132. Sturm und Drang. This German expression 
has been well translated "Storm and Stress." It was 
applied to the literature in Germany (and in Europe) the 
latter part of the XVIIIth century, which was characterised 
by emotional excess of all kinds. A typical book of the 
period was Goethe's Sorrows of Werther (Die Leiden des 
jungen Werthers, 1774). The expression is also often 
applied to the period of adolescence in the life of the 
individual. 

Page 123. Jesuit confessors. The Jesuits, or Society of 
Jesus, one of the most famous religious orders of the 
Roman Catholic Church, was founded in 1534 by Ignatius 
of Loyola and a few others. 

Page 133. Modified by Cheeryble. The Cheeryble Bro- 
thers ax'e characters in Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby (1838- 



142 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

9). Dickens said iii his Preface, "Those who take an 
interest in this tale, will be glad to learn that the 
Brothers Cheeryble live : that their liberal charity, their 
singleness of heart, their noble nature . . . are no creations 
of the Author's brain." 

Page 134. ''Bake the backets." The "backet" is a 
small, square, wooden trough generally used for ashes and 
waste. 

Page 136. Woggs {and footnote). Stevenson's well- 
beloved black Skye terrier. See Balfour's Life, 1, 212, 223. 
Stevenson was so deeply affected by Woggs's death that 
he could not bear ever to own another dog. A Latin 
inscription was placed on his tombstone. . . . This footnote 
was added in 1887, when the essay appeared in Memories 
and Portraits. "Icon" means image (cf. iconoclast) ; 
the word has lately become familiar through the religious 
use of icons by the Russians in the war with Japan. 
Randolph Caldecott (1846-1886) was a well-known artist 
and prominent contributor of sketches to illustrated mag- 
azines. 

Page 136. ^^ Stammering Professors" A "professor" 
here means simply a professing Christian. Stevenson 
alludes to the fact that dogs howl fearfully if some one in 
the house is dying. 

Page 136. "Carneying." • This means coaxing, wheed- 
ling. 

Page 137. Louis Quatorze. Louis XIV of France, who 
died in 1715, after a reign of 72 years, the longest reign 
of any monarch in history. His absolutism and complete 
disregard of the people unconsciously prepared the way 
for the French Revolution in 1789. 



VII 

A COLLEGE MAGAZINE 



ALL through my boyhood and youth, I was known 
. and pointed out for the pattern of an idler ; and 
yet I was always busy on my own private end, which 
was to learn to write. I kept always two books in 
my pocket, one to read, one to write in. As I walked, 
my mind was busy fitting what I saw with appro- 
priate words; when I sat by the roadside, I would 
either read, or a pencil and a penny version-book 
would be in my hand, to note down the features of 
the scene or commemorate some halting stanzas. 
Thus I lived with words. And what I thus wrote 
was for no ulterior use, it was written consciously 
for practice. It was not so much that I wished to 
be an author (though I wished that too) as that I 
had vowed that I would learn to write. That was 
a proficiency that tempted me; and I practised to 
acquire it, as men learn to whittle, in a wager with 
myself. Description was the principal field of my 
exercise; for to any one with senses there is always 
something worth describing, and town and country 
are but one continuous subject. But I worked in 
other ways also; often accompanied my walks with 
dramatic dialogues, in which I played many parts; 

143 



144 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

and often exercised myself in writing down conversa- 
tions from memory. 

This was all excellent, no doubt ; so were the diaries 
I sometimes tried to keep, but always and very speed- 
ily discarded, finding them a school of posturing and 
melancholy sel --deception. And yet this was not the 
most efficient part of my training. Good though it 
was, it only taught me (so far as I have learned them 
at all ) the lower and less intellectual elements of the 
art, the choice of the essential note and the right 
word: things that to a happier constitution had, per- 
haps come by nature. And regarded as training, 
it had one grave defect; for it set me no standard 
of achievement. So that there was perhaps more 
profit, as there was certainly more effort, in my secret 
labours at home. Whenever I read a book or a pas- 
sage that particularly pleased me, in which a thing 
was said or an effect rendered with propriety, in 
which there was either some conspicuous force or 
some happy distinction in the style, I must sit down 
at once and set myself to ape that quality. I was 
unsuccessful, and I knew it; and tried again, and 
was again unsuccessful and always unsuccessful ; but 
at least in these vain bouts, I got some practice in 
rhythm, in harmony, in construction and the co-or- 
dination of parts. I have thus played the sedulous 
ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir 
Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Mon- 
taigne, to Baudelaire and to Obermann. I remember 
one of these monkey tricks, which was called The 
Vanity of Morals: it was to have had a second part, 
The Vanity of Knowledge: and as I had neither 
morality nor scholarship, the names were apt; but 
the second part was never attempted, and the first 



A COLLEGE MAGAZINE 145 

^part was written (which is my reason for recalling 
it, ghostlike, from its ashes) no less than three times: 
first in the manner of Hazlitt, second in the manner 
of Ruskin, who had cast on me a passing spell, and 
third, in a laborious pasticcio of Sir Thomas Browne. 
So with my other works: Cain, an epic, was (save 
the mark!) an imitation of Sordello: Robin Hood, 
a tale in verse, took an eclectic middle course among 
the fields of Keats, Chaucer and Morris: in Mon- 
mouth, a tragedy, I reclined on the bosom of Mr, 
Swinburne; in my innumerable gouty-footed lyrics, 
I followed many masters; in the first draft of The 
King's Pardon, a tragedy, I was on the trail of no 
lesser man than John Webster; in the second draft 
of the same piece, with staggering versatility, I had 
shifted my allegiance to Congreve, and of course con- 
ceived my fable in a less serious vein— for it was 
not Congreve 's verse, it was his exquisite prose, 
that I admired and sought to copy. Even at the 
age of thirteen I had tried to do justice to the inhab- 
itants of the famous city of Peebles in the style 
of the Book of Snohs. So I might go on for ever, 
through all my abortive novels, and down to my 
later plays, of which I think more tenderly, for 
they were not only conceived at first under the brac- 
ing influence of old Dumas, but have met with 
resurrections: one, strangely bettered by another 
hand, came on the stage itself and was played by 
bodily actors; the other, originally known as Semi- 
ramis: a Tragedy, I have observed on bookstalls 
under the alias of Prince Otto. But enough has 
been said to show by what arts of impersonation, 
and in what purely ventriloquial efforts I first saw 
my words on paper. 



146 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

That, like it or not, is the way to learn to write; 
whether I have profited or not, that is the way. It 
was so Keats learned, and there was never a finer 
temperament for literature than Keats 's; it was so, 
ii we could trace it out, that all men have learned ; 
and that is why a revival of letters is always accom- 
panied or heralded by a cast back to earlier and 
fresher models. Perhaps I hear someone cry out: 
But this is not the way to be original ! It is not ; 
nor is there any way but to be born so. Nor yet, if 
you are born original, is there anything in this 
training that shall clip the wings of your originality. 
There can be none more original than Montaigne, 
neither could any be more unlike Cicero; yet no 
craftsman can fail to see how much the one must 
have tried in his time to imitate the other. Burns 
is the very type of a prime force in letters : he was 
of all men the most imitative. Shakespeare himself, 
the imperial, proceeds directly from a school. It is 
only from a school that we can expect to have good 
writers; it is almost invariably from a school that 
great writers, these lawless exceptions, issue. Nor is 
there anything here that should astonish the con- 
siderate. Before he can tell what cadences he truly 
prefers, the student should have tried all that are 
possible ; before he can choose and preserve a fitting 
key of words, he should long have practised the 
literary scales; and it is only after years of such 
gymnastic that he can sit down at last, legions of 
words swarming to his call, dozens of turns of phrase 
simultaneously bidding for his choice, and he himself 
knowing what he wants to do and (within the narrow 
limit of a man's ability) able to do it. 

And it is the great point of these imitations that 



A COLLEGE MAGAZINE 147 

there still shines beyond tjie student's reach his 
inimitable model. Let him try as he please, he is 
still sure of failure ; and it is a very old and a very 
true saying that failure is the only highroad to 
success. I must have had some disposition to learn; 
for I clear-sightedly condemned my own perform- 
ances. I liked doing them indeed; but when they 
were done, I could see they were rubbish. In conse- 
quence, I very rarely showed them even to my 
friends; and such friends as I chose to be my con- 
fidants I must have chosen well, for they had the 
friendliness to be quite plain with me. ' ' Padding, ' ' 
said one. Another wrote : " I cannot understand why 
you do lyrics so badly. ' ' No more could I ! Thrice 
I put myself in the way of a more authoritative re- 
buff, by sending a paper to a magazine. These were 
returned; and I was not surprised nor even pained. 
If they had not been looked at, as (like all amateurs) 
I suspected was the case, there was no good in re- 
peating the experiment ; if they had been looked at — 
well, then I had not yet learned to write, and I must 
keep on learning and living. Lastly, I had a piece 
of good fortune which is the occasion of this paper, 
and by which I was able to see my literature in print, 
and to measure experimentally how far I stood from 
the favour of the public. 



The Speculative Society is a body of some antiq- 
uity, and has counted among its members Scott, 
Brougham, Jeffrey, Horner, Benjamin Constant, 



148 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

Robert Emmet, and mapy a legal and local celebrity 
besides. By an accident, variously explained, it has 
its rooms in the very buildings of the University of 
Edinburgh : a hall, Turkey-carpeted, hung with pic- 
tures, looking, when lighted up at night with fire and 
candle, like some goodly dining-room ; a passage-like 
library, walled with books in their wire cages; and 
a corridor with a fireplace, benches, a table, many 
prints of famous members, and a mural tablet to 
the virtues of a former secretary. Here a member 
can warm himself and loaf and read ; here, in defiance 
of Senatus-consults, he can smoke. The Senatus 
looks askance at these privileges; looks even with a 
somewhat vinegar aspect on the whole society ; which 
argues a lack of proportion in the learned mind, for 
the world, we may be sure, will prize far higher this 
haunt of dead lions than all the living dogs of the 
professorate. 

I sat one December morning in the library of the 
Speculative; a very humble-minded youth, though 
it was a virtue I never had much credit for; yet 
proud of my privileges as a member of the Spec; 
proud of the pipe I was smoking in the teeth of the 
Senatus; and in particular, proud of being in the 
next room to three very distinguished students, who 
were then conversing beside the corridor fire. One 
of these has now his name on the back of several 
volumes, and his voice, I learn, is influential in the 
law courts. Of the death of the second, you have 
just been reading what I had to say. And the third 
also has escaped out of that battle of life in which 
he fought so hard, it may be so unwisely. They were 
all three, as I have said, notable students; but this 
was the most conspicuous. Wealthy, handsome, am- 



A COLLEGE MAGAZINE 149 

bitious, adventurous, diplomatic, a reader of Balzac, 
and of all men that I have known, the most like to 
one of Balzac's characters, he led a life, and was 
attended by an ill fortune, that could be properly 
set forth only in the ComSdie Humaine. He had 
then his eye on Parliament ; and soon after the time 
of which I write, he made a showy speech at a 
political dinner, was cried up to heaven next day 
in the Courant, and the day after was dashed lower 
than earth with a charge of plagiarism in the Scots- 
man. Report would have it (I daresay, very 
wrongly) that he was betrayed by one in whom he 
particularly trusted, and that the author of the 
charge had learned its truth from his own lips. 
Thus, at least, he was up one day on a pinnacle, 
admired and envied by all; and the next, though 
still but a boy, he was publicly disgraced. The blow 
would have broken a less finely tempered spirit ; and 
even him I suppose it rendered reckless ; for he took 
flight to London, and there, in a fast club, disposed 
of the bulk of his considerable patrimony in the 
space of one winter. For years thereafter he lived 
I know not how ; always well dressed, always in good 
hotels and good society, always with empty pockets. 
The charm of his manner may have stood him in 
good stead; but though my own manners are very 
agreeable, I have never found in them a source of 
livelihood; and to explain the miracle of his con- 
tinued existence, I must fall back upon the theory 
of the philosopher, that in his case, as in all of the 
same kind, "there was a suffering relative in the 
background." From this genteel eclipse he reap- 
peared upon the scene, and presently sought me 
out in the <3haracter of a generous editor. It is in 



150 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

this part that I best remember him; tall, slender, 
with a not ungraceful stoop ; looking quite like a 
refined gentleman, and quite like an urbane adven- 
turer ; smiling with an engaging ambiguity ; cocking 
at you one peaked eyebrow with a great appearance 
of finesse; speaking low and sweet and thick, with 
a touch of burr; telling strange tales with singular 
deliberation and, to a patient listener, excellent 
effect. After all these ups and downs, he seemed 
still, like the rich student that he was of yore, to 
breathe of money ; seemed still perfectly sure of him- 
self and certain of his end. Yet he was then upon 
the brink of his last overthrow. He had set himself 
to found the strangest thing in our society: one of 
those periodical sheets from which men suppose 
themselves to learn opinions ; in which young gentle- 
men from the universities are encouraged, at so 
much a line, to garble facts, insult foreign nations 
and calumniate private individuals ; and which are 
now the source of glory, so that if a man's name 
be often enough printed there, he becomes a kind 
of demigod; and people will pardon him when he 
talks back and forth, as they do for Mr. Gladstone; 
and crowd him to suffocation on railway platforms, 
as they did the other day to General Boulanger; 
and buy his literary works, as I hope you have just 
done for me. Our fathers, when they were upon 
some great enterprise, would sacrifice a life; build- 
ing, it may be, a favourite slave into the founda- 
tions of their palace. It was with his own life that 
my companion disarmed the envy of the gods. He 
fought his paper single-handed ; trusting no one, for 
he was something of a cynic; up early and down 
late, for he was nothing of a sluggard; daily ear- 



A COLLEGE MAGAZINE 151 

wigging inftuential men, for he was a master of 
ingratiation. In that slender and silken fellow there 
must have been a rare vein of courage, that he should 
thus have died at his employment; and doubtless 
ambition spoke loudly in his ear, and doubtless love 
also, for it seems there was a marriage in his view 
had he succeeded. But he died, and his paper died 
after him ; and of all this grace, and tact, and 
courage, it must seem to our blind eyes as if there 
had come literally nothing. 

These three students sat, as I was saying, in the 
corridor, under the mural tablet that records the 
virtues of Macbean, the former secretary. We would 
often smile at that ineloquent memorial, and thought 
it a poor thing to come into the world at all and 
leave no more behind one than Macbean. And yet 
of these three, two are gone and have left less; and 
this book, perhaps, when it is old and foxy, and some 
one picks it up in a corner of a book-shop, and 
glances through it, smiling at the old, graceless turns 
of speech, and perhaps for the love of Alma Mater 
(which may be still extant and flourishing) buys it, 
not without haggling, for some pence— this book 
may alone preserve a memory of James Walter Fer- 
rier and Robert Glasgow Brown. 

Their thoughts ran very differently on that 
December morning; they were all on fire with 
ambition; and when they had called me in to them, 
and made me a sharer in their design, I too became 
drunken with pride and hope. We were to found 
a University magazine. A pair of little, active 
brothers— Livingstone by name, great skippers on 
the foot, great rubbers of the hands, who kept a 
book-shop over against the University building— had 



152 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

been debauched to play the part of publishers. We 
four were to be conjunct editors, and, what was the 
main point of the concern, to print our own works; 
while, by every rule of arithmetic— that flatterer of 
credulity— the adventure must succeed and bring 
great profit. Well, well: it was a bright vision. 
I went home that morning walking upon air. To 
have been chosen by these three distinguished stu- 
dents was to me the most unspeakable advance; it 
was my first draught of consideration ; it reconciled 
me to myself and to my fellow-men ; and as I steered 
round the railings at the Tron, I could not withhold 
my lips from smiling publicly. Yet, in the bottom 
of my heart, I knew that magazine would be a 
grim fiasco; I knew it would not be worth reading; 
T knew, even if it were, that nobody would read it; 
and I kept wondering, how I should be able, upon 
my compact income of twelve pounds per annum, 
payable monthly, to meet my share in the expense. 
It was a comfortable thought to me that I had a 
father. 

The magazine appeared, in a yellow cover which 
was the best part of it, for at least it was unas- 
suming ; it ran four months in undisturbed obscurity, 
and died without a gasp. The first number was 
edited by all four of us with prodigious bustle; 
the second fell principally into the hands of Ferrier 
and me ; the third I edited alone ; and it has long been 
a solemn question who it was that edited the fourth. 
It would perhaps be still more difficult to say who 
read it. Poor yellow sheet, that looked so hopefully 
in the Livingstones ' window ! Poor, harmless paper, 
that might have gone to print a Shakespeare on, and 
was instead so clumsiJy defaced with nonsense ! And, 



A COLLEGE MAGAZINE 153 

shall I say, Poor Editors 1 I cannot pity myself, 
to whom it was all pure gain. It was no news to 
me, but only the wholesome confirmation of my 
judgment, when the magazine struggled into half- 
birth, and instantly sickened and subsided into night. 
1 had sent a copy to the lady with whom my heart 
was at that time somewhat engaged, and who did 
all that in her lay to break it; and she, with some 
tact, passed over the gift and my cherished contribu- 
tions in silence. I will not say that I was pleased 
at this; but I will tell her now, if by any chance 
she takes up the work of her former servant, that 
I thought the better of her taste. I cleared the decks 
after this lost engagement; had the necessary inter- 
view with my father, which passed off not amiss; 
paid over my share of the expense to the two little, . 
active brothers, who rubbed their hands as much, 
but methought skipped rather less than formerly, 
having perhaps, these two also, embarked upon the 
enterprise with some graceful illusions; and then, 
reviewing the whole episode, I told myself that the 
time was not yet ripe, nor the man ready; and to 
work I went again with my penny version-books, 
having fallen back in one day from the printed 
author to the manuscript student. 



in 



From this defunct periodical I am going to reprint 
one of my own papers. The poor little piece is all 
tail-foremost. I have done my best to straighten its 
array, I have pruned it fearlessly, and it remains 



154 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

invertebrate and wordy. No self-respecting maga- 
zine would print the thing; and here you behold it 
in a bound volume, not for any worth of its own, 
but for the sake of the man whom it purports dimly 
to represent and some of whose sayings it preserves ; 
so that in this volume of Memories and Portraits, 
Robert Young, the Swanston gardener, may stand 
alongside of John Todd, the Swanston shepherd. Not 
that John and Robert drew very close together in 
their lives; for John was rough, he smelt of the 
windy brae ; and Robert was gentle, and smacked of 
the garden in the hollow. Perhaps it is to my shame 
that I liked John the better of the two ; he had grit 
and dash, and that salt of the Old Adam that pleases 
men with any savage inheritance of blood; and 
he was a wayfarer besides, and took my gipsy fancy. 
But however that may be, and however Robert's 
profile may be blurred in the boyish sketch that 
follows, he was a man of a most quaint and beautiful 
nature, whom, if it were possible to recast a piece 
of work so old, I should like well to draw again with 
a maturer touch. And as I think of him and of 
John, I wonder in what other country two such 
men would be found dwelling together, in a hamlet 
of some twenty cottages, in the woody fold of a 
green hill. 



NOTES 

THIS article made its first appearance in the volume 
Memories and Portraits (1887). It was divided into 
three parts. The interest of this essay is almost 
wholly autobiographical, telling us, with more or 
less seriousness, how its author "learned to write." 
After Stevenson became famous, this confession 
attracted universal attention, and is now one of the 
best-known of all his compositions. Many youthful 
aspirants for literary fame have been moved by its 
perusal to adopt a similar method; but while Stevenson's 
system, if faithfully followed, would doubtless correct 
m.any faults, it would not of itself enable a man to write 
another ^s Triplex or Treasure Island. It was genius, 
not industry, that placed Stevenson in English literature. 

Page 143. Pattern of an Idler. See his essay in this 
volume. An Apology for Idlers. 

Page 144. A school of posturing. It is a nice psycho- 
logical question whether or not it is possible for one to 
write a diary with absolutely no thought of its being read 
by some one else. 

Page 144. Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir 
Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to 
Beaudelaire, and to Obermann. For Hazlitt, see page 39. 
Charles Lamb (1775-1834), author of the delightful Essays 
of Elia (1822-24), the tone of which book is often echoed 
in Stevenson's essays. . . . Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682), 
regarded by many as the greatest prose writer of the 
seventeenth century; his best books are Religio Medici 
(the religion of a physician), 1642, and Urn Burial (1658). 
The 300th anniversary of his birth was widely celebrate^ 

155 



156 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

on 19 October 1905. . . . Daniel Defoe (1661-1731), an 
enormously prolific writer; his first important novel, 
Robinson Crusoe (followed by many others) was written 
when he was 58 years old. . . . Nathaniel Hawthorne, the 
greatest literary artist that America has ever produced was 
born 4 July 1804, and died in 1864. His best novel (the 
finest in American Literature) was The Scarlet Letter 
(1850). . . . Montaigne. Stevenson Avas heavily indebted to 
this wonderful genius. See note, page 139 . . . Charles 
Baudelaire (1821-1867) wrote the brilliant and decadent 
Fleurs du Mai (1857-61). He translated Poe into French, 
and was partly responsible for Poe's immense vogue in 
France. Had Baudelaire's French followers possessed the 
power of their master, we should be able to forgive them 
for writing. . . . Obermann. Obermann is the title of a 
story by the French writer Etienne Pivert de Senancour 
(1770-1846). The book, which appeared in 1804, is full 
of vague melancholy, in the Werther fashion, and is 
more of a psychological study than a novel. In recent 
years, AmieVs Journal and Sienkiewicz's Without Dogma 
belong to the same school of literature. Matthew Arnold 
was fond of quoting from Senancour's Obermann. 

Page 145. Buskin . . . Pasticcio . . . Sordello . . . Morris 
. . . Swinburne . . . John Webster . . . Congreve. These 
names exhibit the astonishing variety of Stevenson's 
youthful attempts, for they represent nearly every possible 
style of composition. John Ruskin (1819-1900) exercised 
a greater influence thirty years ago than he does to-day 
Stevenson in the words "a passing spell," seems to 
apologise for having been influenced by him at all. . . . 
Pasticcio, an Italian word, meaning "pie" : Swinburne uses 
it in the sense of "medley," which is about the same as 
its significance here. Sordello: Stevenson naturally 
accompanies this statement with a parenthetical exclamation. 
Sordello, published in 1840, is the most obscure of all 
Browning's poems, and for many years blinded critics to 



NOTES 157 

the poet's genius. Innumerable are the witticisms aimed 
at this opaque work. See, for example, W. Sharp's Life 
of Browning . . . William Morris (1834-96), author of the 
Earthly Paradise (1868-70) : for his position and influence 
in XlXth century literature see H. A. Beers, History of 
English Romanticism, Vol. II. ... Algernon Charles Swin- 
burne, born 1837, generally regarded (1906) as England's 
foremost living poet, is famous chiefly for the melodies 
of his verse. His influence seems to be steadily declining 
and he is certainly not so much read as formerly. . . . 
For John Webster and Congreve, see notes, pp. 98, 97. 

Page 145. City of Peebles in the style of the Book of 
Snobs. Thackeray's Book of Snobs was published in 1848. 
Peebles is the county town of Peebles County in the 
South of Scotland. 

Page 145. My later plays, etc. Stevenson's four plays 
were not successful. They were all written in collaboration 
with W. E. Henley. Deacon Brodie was printed in 1880: 
Admiral Guinea and Beau Austin in 1884 : Macaire in 1885. 
In 1892, the first three were published in one volume, 
under the title Three Plays: In 1896 all four appeared 
in a volume called Four Plays. At the time the essay A 
College Magazine was published, only one of these plays 
had been acted. Deacon Brodie, to which Stevenson refers 
in our text. This "came on the stage itself and 
was played by bodily actors" at Pullan's Theatre of 
Varieties, Bradford, England, 28 December 1882, and in 
March 1883 at Her Majesty's Theatre, Aberdeen, "when it 
was styled a 'New Scotch National Drama.' "— Prideaux, 
Bibliography, p. 10. It was later produced at Prince's 
Theatre, London, 2 July 1884, and in Montreal, 26 
September 1887. Beau Austin was played at the Hay- 
market Theatre, London, 3 Nov. 1890. Admiral Guinea 
was played at the Avenue Theatre, on the afternoon of 
29 Nov. 1897, and, like the others, was not successful. 
The AthencBum for 4 Dec. 1897 contains an interesting 



158 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

criticism of this drama. . . . Semiramis was the original 
plan of a "tragedy," which Stevenson afterwards rewrote 
as a novel, Prince Otto, and published in 1885. 

Page 146. It was so Keats learned. This must be 
swallowed with a grain of salt. The best criticism of the 
poetry of Keats is contained in his own Letters, which 
have been edited by Colvin and by Foraian. 

Page 146. Montaigne . . . Cicero, Montaigne, as a child, 
spoke Latin before he could French : see his Essays. 
Montaigne is always original, frank, sincere: Cicero (in 
his orations) is always a Poseur. 

Page 146. Burns . . . Shakespeare. Some reflection on, 
and investigation of these statements by Stevenson, will 
be highly beneficial to the student. 

Page 146. The literary scales. It is very interesting 
to note that Thomas Carlyle had completely mastered the 
technique of ordinary prose composition, before he 
deliberately began to write in his own picturesque style, 
which has been called "Carlylese"; note the enormous 
difference in style between his Life of Schiller (1825) 
and his Sartor Resartus (1833-4). Carlyle would be a 
shining illustration of the point Stevenson is trying to 
make. 

No notes have been added to the second and third parts 
of this essay, as these portions are unimportant, and may 
be omitted by the student; they are really introductory 
to something quite different, and are printed in our edition 
only to make this essay complete. 



vni 



BOOKS WHICH HAVE 
INFLUENCED ME' 



THE Editor^ has somewhat insidiously laid a trap 
for his correspondents, the question put appear- 
ing at first so innocent, truly cutting so deep. It is 
not, indeed, until after some reconnaissance and review 
that the writer awakes to find himself engaged upon 
something in the nature of autobiography, or, per- 
haps worse, upon a chapter in the life of that little, 
beautiful brother whom we once all had, and whom 
we have all lost and mourned, the man we ought 
to have been, the man we hoped to be. But when 
word has been passed (even to an editor), it should, 
if possible, be kept ; and if sometimes I am wise and 
say too little, and sometimes weak and say too much, 
the blame must lie at the door of the person who 
entrapped me. 

The most influential books, and the truest in their 
influence, are works of fiction. They do not pin the 
reader to a dogma, which he must afterwards dis- 
cover to be inexact; they do not teach him a lesson, 
which he must afterwards unlearn. They repeat, 
they rearrange, they clarify the lessons of life ; they 

^ First published in the BritisH Weekly, May 13, 1887. 
''Of the British Weekly. 

159 



160 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS " 

disengage us from ourselves, they constrain us to the 
acquaintance of others; and they show us the web 
of experience, not as we can see it for ourselves, but 
with a singular change— that monstrous, consuming 
ego of ours being, for the nonce, struck out. To be 
so, they must be reasonably true to the human 
comedy; and any work that is so serves the turn 
of instruction. But the course of our education is 
answered best by those poems and romances where 
we breathe a magnanimous atmosphere of thought 
and meet generous and pious characters. Shake- 
speare has served me best. Few living friends have 
had upon me an influence so strong for good as 
Hamlet or Rosalind. The last character, already 
well beloved in the reading, I had the good fortune 
to see, I must think, in an impressionable hour, 
played by Mrs. Scott Siddons. Nothing has ever 
more moved, more delighted, more refreshed me ; nor 
has the influence quite passed away. Kent's brief 
speech over the dying Lear had a great effect upon 
my mind, and was the burthen of my reflections for 
long, so profoundly, so touchingly generous did it 
appear in sense, so overpowering in expression. 
Perhaps my dearest and best friend outside of 
Shakespeare is D'Artagnan— the elderly D 'Artagnan 
of the Vicomte de Bragelonne. I know not a more 
human soul, nor, in his way, a finer; I shall be 
very sorry for the man who is so much of a pedant 
in morals that he cannot learn from the Captain of 
Musketeers. Lastly, I must name the Pilgrim's 
Progress, a book that breathes of every beautiful and 
valuable emotion. 

But of works of art little can be said ; their influ- 
ence is profound and silent, like the influence of 



BOOKS WHICH HAVE INFLUENCED ME 161 

nature; they mould by contact; we drink them up 
like water, and are bettered, yet know not how. It 
is in books more specifically didactic that we can 
follow out the effect, and distinguish and weigh and 
compare. A book which has been very influential 
upon me fell early into my hands, and so may stand 
first, though I think its influence was only sensible 
later on, and perhaps still keeps growing, for it is 
a book not easily outlived : the Essais of Montaigne. 
That temperate and genial picture of life is a great 
gift to place in the hands of persons of to-day ; they 
will find in these smiling pages a magazine of hero- 
ism and wisdom, all of an antique strain; they will 
have their ' ' linen decencies ' ' and excited orthodoxies 
fluttered, and will (if they have any gift of reading) 
perceive that these have not been fluttered without 
some excuse and ground of reason; and (again 
if they have any gift of reading) they will end 
by seeing that this old gentleman was in a dozen 
ways a finer fellow, and held in a dozen ways a nobler 
view of life, than they or their contemporaries. 

The next book, in order of time, to influence me, 
was the New Testament, and in particular the Gospel 
according to St. Matthew. I believe it would startle 
and move any one if they could make a certain effort 
of imagination and read it freshly like a book, not 
droningly and dully like a portion of the Bible. Any 
one would then be able to see in it those truths which 
we are all courteously supposed to know and all 
modestly refrain from applying. But upon this 
subject it is perhaps better to be silent. 

I come next to Whitman's Leaves of Grass, a book 
of singular service, a book which tumbled the world 
upside down for me, blew into space a thousand 



162 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

cobwebs of genteel and ethical illusion, and, ha^/ing 
thus shaken my tabernacle of lies, set me back again 
upon a strong foundation of all the original and 
manly virtues. But it is, once more, only a book 
for those who have the gift of reading. I will be 
very frank— I believe it is so with all good books 
except, perhaps, fiction. The average man lives, 
and must live, so wholly in convention, that gun- 
powder charges of the truth are more apt to dis- 
compose than to invigorate his creed. Either he 
cries out upon blasphemy and indecency, and 
crouches the closer round that little idol of part- 
truths and part-conveniences which is the contem- 
porary deity, or he is convinced by what is new, 
forgets what is old, and becomes truly blasphemous 
and indecent himself. New truth is only useful 
to supplement the old; rough truth is only wanted 
to expand, not to destroy, our civil and often elegant 
conventions. He who cannot judge had better stick 
to fiction and the daily papers. There he will get 
little harm, and, in the first at least, some good. 

Close upon the back of my discovery of Whitman, 
I came under the influence of Herbert Spencer. No 
more persuasive rabbi exists. How much of his vast 
structure will bear the touch of time, how much is 
clay and how much brass, it were too curious to 
inquire. But his words, if dry, are always manlj^ 
and honest; there dwells in his pages a spirit of 
highly abstract joy, plucked naked like an algebraic 
symbol but still joyful; and the reader will find 
there a caput mortuum of piety, with little indeed 
of its loveliness, but with most of its essentials ; and 
these two qualities make him a wholesome, as his 
intellectual vigour makes him a bracing, writer. I 



BOOKS WHICH HAVE INFLUENCED ME 163 

should be much of a hound if I lost my gratitude to 
Herbert Spencer. 

Goethe's Life, by Lewes, had a great importance 
for me when it first fell into my hands — a strange 
instance of the partiality of man's good and man's 
evil. I know no one whom I less admire than Goethe ; 
he seems a very epitome of the sins of genius, break- 
ing open the doors of private life, and wantonly 
wounding friends, in that crowning offence of 
Werther, and in his own character a mere pen-and- 
ink Napoleon, conscious of the rights and duties 
of superior talents as a Spanish inquisitor was con- 
scious of the rights and duties of his office. And 
yet in his fine devotion to his art, in his honest and 
serviceable friendship for Schiller, what lessons are 
contained! Biography, usually so false to its office, 
does here for once perform for us some of the work 
of fiction, reminding us, that is, of the truly mingled 
tissue of man's nature, and how huge faults and 
shining virtues cohabit and persevere in the same 
character. History serves us well to this effect, but 
in the originals, not in the pages of the popular 
epitomiser, who is bound, by the very nature of his 
task, to make us feel the difference of epochs instead 
of the essential identity of man, and even in the 
originals only to those who can recognise their own 
human virtues and defects in strange forms, often 
inverted and under strange names, often inter- 
changed. Martial is a poet of no good repute, and 
it gives a man new thoughts to read his works dis- 
passionately, and find in this unseemly jester's 
serious passages the image of a kind, wise, and self- 
respecting gentleman. It is customary, I suppose, in 
reading Martial, to leave out these pleasant verses; 



164 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

I never heard of them, at least, until I found them 
for myself; and this partiality is one among a 
thousand things that help to build up our dis- 
torted and hysterical conception of the great Roman 
Empire. 

This brings us by a natural transition to a very 
noble book— the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. 
The dispassionate gravity, the noble for get fulness 
of self, the tenderness of others, that are there ex- 
pressed and were practised on so great a scale in the 
life of its writer, make this book a book quite by itself. 
No one can read it and not be moved. Yet it scarcely 
or rarely appeals to the feelings— those very mobile, 
those not very trusty parts of man. Its address lies 
further back: its lesson comes more deeply home; 
when you have read, you carry away with you a 
memory of the man himself; it is as though you 
had touched a loyal hand, looked into brave eyes, 
and made a noble friend; there is another bond on 
you thenceforward, binding you to life and to the 
love of virtue. 

Wordsworth should perhaps come next. Every 
one has been influenced by Wordsworth, and it is 
hard to tell precisely how. A certain innocence, a 
rugged austerity of joy, a night of the stars, "the 
silence that is in the lonely hills," something of the 
cold thrill of dawn, cling to his work and give it 
a particular address to what is best in us. I do 
not know that you learn a lesson; you need not— 
Mill did not— agree with any one of his beliefs; and 
yet the spell is cast. Such are the best teachers: 
a dogma learned is only a new error— the old one 
was perhaps as good; but a spirit communicated is 
a perpetual possession. These best teachers climb 



BOOKS WHICH HAVE INFLUENCED ME 165 

beyond teaching to the plane of art ; it is themselves, 
and what is best in themselves, that they commu- 
nicate. 

I should never forgive myself if I forgot The 
Egoist. It is art, if you like, but it belongs purely 
to didactic art, and from all the novels I have read 
(and I have read thousands) stands in a place by 
itself. Here is a Nathan for the modern David; 
here is a book to send the blood into men's faces. 
Satire, the angry picture of human faults, is not 
great art; we can all be angry with our neighbour; 
what we want is to be shown, not his defects, of 
which we are too conscious, but his merits, to which 
we are too blind. And The Egoist is a satire; so 
much must be allowed ; but it is a satire of a singular 
quality, which tells you nothing of that obvious mote, 
which is engaged from first to last with that invisible 
beam. It is yourself that is hunted down ; these are 
your own faults that are dragged into the day and 
numbered, with lingering relish, with cruel cunning 
and precision. A young friend of Mr. Meredith's 
(as I have the story) came to him in an agony. 
''This is too bad of you," he cried. "Willoughby is 
me!" "No, my dear fellow," said the author; "he 
is all of us." I have read The Egoist five or six 
times myself, and I mean to read it again ; for I am 
like the young friend of the anecdote— I think Wil- 
loughby an unmanly but a very serviceable exposure 
of myself. 

I suppose, when I am done, I shall find that I have 
forgotten much that was most influential, as I see 
already I have forgotten Thoreau, and Hazlitt, 
whose paper "On the Spirit of Obligations" was a 
turning-point in my life, and Penn, whose little 



166 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

book of aphorisms had a brief but strong effect on 
me, and Mitford's Tales of Old Japan, wherein I 
learned for the first time the proper attitude of any- 
rational man to his country's laws— a secret found, 
and kept, in the Asiatic islands. That I should 
commemorate all is more than I can hope or the 
Editor could ask. It will be more to the point, after 
having said so much upon improving books, to say 
a word or two about the improvable reader. The 
gift of reading, as I have called it, is not very- 
common, nor very generally understood. It consists, 
first of all, in a vast intellectual endowment— a free 
grace, I find I must call it— by which a man rises 
to understand that he is not punctually right, nor 
those from whom he differs absolutely wrong. He 
may hold dogmas; he may hold them passionately; 
and he may know that others hold them but coldly, 
or hold them differently, or hold them not at all. 
Well, if he has the gift of reading, these others will 
be full of meat for him. They will see the other 
side of propositions and the other side of virtues. 
He need not change his dogma for that, but he may 
change his reading of that dogma, and he must 
supplement and correct his deductions from it. A 
human truth, which is always very much a lie, hides 
as much of life as it displays. It is men who hold 
another truth, or, as it seems to us, perhaps, a dan- 
gerous lie, who can extend our restricted field of 
knowledge, and rouse our drowsy consciences. Some- 
thing that seems quite new, or that seems insolently 
false or very dangerous, is the test of a reader. If 
he tries to see what it means, what truth excuses it, 
he has the gift, and let him read. If he is merely 
hurt, or offended, or exclaims upon his author's 



BOOKS WHICH HAVE INFLUENCED ME 167 

folly, he had better take to the daily papers ; he will 
never be a reader. 

And here, with the aptest illustrative force, after 
I hav« laid down my part-truth, I must step in with 
its opposite. For, after all, we are vessels of a very 
limited content. Not all men can read all books; 
it is only in a chosen few that any man will find his 
appointed food; and the fittest lessons are the most 
palatable, and make themselves welcome to the mind. 
A writer learns this early, and it is his chief support ; 
he goes on unafraid, laying down the law ; and he 
is sure at heart that most of what he says is demon- 
strably false, and much of a mingled strain, and 
some hurtful, and very little good for service; but 
he is sure besides that when his words fall into the 
hands of any genuine reader, they will be weighed 
and winnowed, and only that which suits will be 
assimilated; and when they fall into the hands of 
one who cannot intelligently read, they come there 
quite silent and inarticulate, falling upon deaf ears, 
and his secret is kept as if he had not written. 



NOTES 

THIS article first appeared in the British Weekly for 
13 May 1887, forming Stevenson's contribution to a 
symposium on this subject by some of the celebrated 
writers of the day, including- Gladstone, Ruskin, Hamer- 
ton; and others as widely different as Archdeacon Farrar 
and Rider Haggard. In the same year (1887) the papers 
were all collected and published by the Weekly in a 
volume, with the title Books Which Have Influenced Me. 
This essay was later included in the complete editions 
of Stevenson's Works (Edinburgh ed.. Vol. XI, Thistle ed.. 
Vol. XXII). 

Page 159. The most influential books . . . are works of 
fiction. This statement is undoubtedly true, if we use the 
word "fiction" in the sense understood here by Stevenson. 
It is curious, however, to note the rise in dignity of "works 
of fiction," and of "novels"; people nused to read them 
with apologies, and did not like to be caught at it. 
The cheerful audacity of Stevenson's declaration would 
have seemed like blasphemy fifty years earlier. 

Page 160. BIrs. Scott Siddons. Not for a moment to be 
confounded with the great actress Sarah Siddons, who 
died in 1831. Mrs. Scott Siddons, in spite of Stevenson's 
enthusiasm, was not an actress of remarkable power. 

Page 160. Kent's brief speech. Toward the end of King 
Lear. 

"Vex not his ghost: 0, let him pass! he hates him 
That would upon the rack of this tough world 
Stretch him out longer." 

168 



NOTES 169 

Page 160. D'Artagnan . . . Vicomte de Bragelonne. See 
Stevenson's essay, A Gossip on a Novel of Dumas's (1887), 
in Memories and Portraits. See also notes, pp. 35, 99. Vi- 
comte de Bragelonne is the title of the sequel to Twenty 
Years After, which is the sequel to the Musketeers. Dumas 
wrote 257 volumes of romance, plays, travels etc. 

Page 160. Pilgrim's Progress. See note, p. 120. 

Page 161. Essais of Montaigne. See note, p. 139. The 
best translation in English of the Essais is that by the 
Elizabethan, John Florio (1550-1625), a contemporary of 
Montaigne. His translation appeared in 1603, and may 
now be obtained complete in the handy "Temple" classics. 
There is a copy of Florio's Montaigne with Ben Jonson's 
autograph, and also one that has what many believe to 
be a genuine autograph of Shakspere. 

Page 161. "Linen decencies:' "The ghost of a linen 
decency yet haunts us."— Milton, Areopagitica. 

Page 161. Whitman's Leaves of Grass. See Stevenson's 
admirable essay on Walt Whitman (1878), also note, p. 
57. 

Page 162. Have the gift of reading. "Books are written 
to be read by those who can understand them. Their 
possible effect on those who cannot, is a matter of medical 
rather than of literary interest."— Prof. W. Raleigh, The 
English Novel, remarks on Tom Jones, Chap. VI. 

Page 162. Herbert Spencer. See note, p. 94. 

Page 162. Caput mortuum. Dry kernel. Literary, "dead 
head." 

Page 163. Goethe's Life, hy Lewes. The standard Life 
of Goethe (in English) is still that by George Henry 
Lewes (1817-1878), the husband of George Eliot. His 
Life of Goethe appeared in 1855 ; he later made a simpler, 
abridged edition, called The Story of Goethe's Life. 
Goethe, the greatest literary genius since Shakspere, and 
now generally ranked among the four supreme writers 
of the world. Homer, Dante, Shakspere, Goethe, was born 
in 1749, and died in 1832. Stevenson, like most British 



170 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

critics, is rather severe on Goethe's character. The student 
should read Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe^ a 
book full of wisdom and perennial delight. For Werther^ 
see note, p. 141. The friendship between Goethe and 
Schiller (1759-1805), "his honest and serviceable friend- 
ship," as Stevenson puts it, is among the most beautiful 
things to contemplate in literaiy history. Before the 
theatre in Weimar, Germany, where the tAvo men lived, 
stands a remarkable statue of the pair: and their coffins 
lie side by side in a crypt in the same toAvn. 

Page 163. Martial. Poet, w4t and epigrammatist, born 
in Spain 43 A. D., died 104. He lived in Rome from 66 
to 100, enjoying a high reputation as a writer. 

Page 164. Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.. Marcus 
Aurelius Antoninus, often called "the noblest of Pagans" 
was born 121 A. D., and died 180. His Meditations have 
been translated into the chief modern languages, and 
though their author was hostile to Christianity, the ethics 
of the book are much the same as those of the New 
Testament. 

Page 164. Wordsivorth . . . Mill. William Wordsworth 
(1770-1850), poet-laureate (1843-1850), is by many re- 
garded as the third poet in English literature, after Shak- 
spere and Milton, whose places are unassailable. Other 
candidates for the third place are Chaucer and Spenser. 
"The silence that is in the lonely hills" is loosely quoted 
from Wordsworth's Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle, 
Upon the Restoration of Lord Clifford, published in 1807. 
The passage reads: 

"The silence that is in the starry sky. 
The sleep that is among the lonely hills." 

... In the Autobiography (1873) of John Stuart Mill 
(1806-1873), there is a remarkable passage where he 
testifies to the influence exerted upon him by Wordsworth. 
Page 165. The Egoist. See note, p. 100. Stevenson 
never tired of singing the praises of this novel. 



NOTES 171 

Page 165. A Nathan for the modern David. The 
famous accusation of the prophet to the king, "Thou art 
the man." See II Sam. 12. 

Page 165. Thoreau . . . Hazlitt . . . Penn . . . Mitford's 
Tales . . . Henry David Thoreau (1817-18G2), the Amer- 
ican naturalist and writer, whose works impressed Steven- 
son deeply. See the latter's excellent essay on Thoreau 

(1880), in Familiar Studies of Men and Books Hazlitt, 

See note, p. 39. His paper. On the Spirit of Obligations, 
appeared in The Plain Speaker, 2 Vols., 1826. Penn, 
whose little book of aphorisms. This refers to William 
Penn's famous book. Some Fruits of Solitude: in Reflec- 
tions and Maxims relating to the Conduct of Human Life 
(1693). Edmund Gosse says, in his Introduction to a 
charming little edition of this book in 1900, "Stevenson 
had intended to make this book and its author the subject 
of one of his critical essays. In February 1880 he was 
preparing to begin it ... He never found the opportunity 
. . . But it has left an indelible stamp on the tenor of his 
moral writings. The philosophy of R. L. S. . , . is tinc- 
tured through and through with the honest, shrewd, and 
genial maxims of Penn." Stevenson himself, in his Letters 
(Vol. I, pp. 232, 233), spoke of this little book in the 
highest terms of praise. 

Page 166. Mitford's Tales. Mary Russell Mitford 
(1787-1855), a novelist and dramatist who enjoyed an 
immense vogue. "Her inimitable series of country 
sketches, drawn from her own experiences at Three Mile 
Cross, entitled ^Our Village,' began to appear in 1819 in 
the ^Lady's Magazine,' a little-known periodical, whose 
sale was thereby increased from 250 to 2,000. . . . The 
sketches had an enormous success, and were collected in 
five volumes, published respectively in 1824, 1826, 1828, 
1830, and 1832. . . . The book may be said to have laid 
the foundation of a branch of literature hitherto untried. 
The sketches resemble Dutch paintings in their fidelity 
of detail."— Z)ic. Nat. Biog. 



IX 



PULVIS ET UMBRA 



WE look for some reward of our endeavors and 
are disappointed ; not success, not happiness, 
not even peace of conscience, crowns our ineffectual 
efforts to do well. Our frailties are invincible, are 
virtues barren ; the battle goes sore against us to the 
going down of the sun. The canting moralist 
tells us of right and wrong; and we look abroad, 
even on the face of our small earth, and find them 
change with every climate, and no country where 
some action is not honoured for a virtue and none 
where it is not branded for a vice; and we look in 
our experience, and find no vital congruity in the 
wisest rules, but at the best a municipal fitness. It 
is not strange if we are tempted to despair of good. 
We ask too much. Our religions and moralities have 
been trimmed to flatter us, till they are all emasculate 
and sentimentalised, and only please and weaken. 
Truth is of a rougher strain. In the harsh face of 
life, faith can read a bracing gospel. The human 
race is a thing more ancient than the ten command- 
ments ; and the bones and revolutions of the Kosmos, 
in whose joints we are but moss and fungus, more 
ancient still. 

178 



174 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 



Of the Kosmos in the last resort, science reports 
many doubtful things and all of them appalling. 
There seems no substance to this solid globe on which 
we stamp : nothing but symbols and ratios. Symbols 
and ratios carry us and bring us forth and beat us 
down ; gravity that swings the incommensurable suns 
and worlds through space, is but a figment varying 
inversely as the squares of distances; and the suns 
and worlds themselves, imponderable figures of ab- 
straction, NH3 and HoO. Consideration dares not 
dwell upon this view ; that way madness lies ; science 
carries us into zones of speculation, where there is no 
habitable city for the mind of man. 

But take the Kosmos with a grosser faith, as our 
senses give it to us. We behold space sown with rota- 
tory islands; suns and worlds and the shards and 
wrecks of systems: some, like the sun, still blazing; 
some rotting, like the earth; others, like the moon, 
stable in desolation. All of these we take to be 
made of something we call matter: a thing which 
no analysis can help us to conceive ; to whose incredi- 
ble properties no familiarity can reconcile our minds. 
This stuff, when not purified by the lustration of 
fire, rots uncleanly into something we call life; 
seized through all its atoms with a pediculous 
malady; swelling in tumours that become inde- 
pendent, sometimes even (by an abhorrent prodigy) 
locomotory; one splitting into millions, millions 
cohering into one, as the malady proceeds through 
varying stages. This vital putrescence of the dust, 



PULVIS ET UMBRA 175 

used as we are to it, yet strikes us with occasional 
disgust, and the profusion of worms in a piece of 
ancient turf, or the air of a marsh darkened with 
insects, will sometimes check our breathing so that 
we aspire for cleaner places. But none is clean : the 
moving sand is infected with lice; the pure spring, 
where it bursts out of the mountain, is a mere issue 
of worms; even in the hard rock the crystal is 
forming. 

In two main shapes this eruption covers the coun- 
tenance of the earth : the animal and the vegetable : 
one in some degree the inversion of the other: the 
second rooted to the spot; the first coming detached 
out of its natal mud, and scurrying abroad with the 
myriad feet of insects or towering into the heavens 
on the wings of birds : a thing so inconceivable that, 
if it be well considered, the heart stops. To what 
passes with the anchored vermin, we have little clue : 
doubtless they have their joys and sorrows, their 
delights and killing agonies: it appears not how. 
But of the locomotory, to which we ourselves belong, 
we can tell more. These share with us a thousand 
miracles: the miracles of sight, of hearing, of the 
projection of sound, things that bridge space; the 
miracles of memory and reason, by which the present 
is conceived, and when it is gone, its image kept 
living in the brains of man and brute; the miracle 
of reproduction, with its imperious desires and stag- 
gering consequences. And to put the last touch upon 
this mountain mass of the revolting and the incon- 
ceivable, all these prey upon each other, lives tearing 
other lives in pieces, cramming them inside them- 
selves, and by that summary process, growing fat: 
the vegetarian, the whale, perhaps the tree, not less 



176 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

than the lion of the desert; for the vegetarian is 
only the eater of the dumb. 

Meanwhile our rotary island loaded with pred- 
atory life, and more drenched with blood, both 
animal and vegetable, than ever mutinied ship, scuds 
through space with unimaginable speed, and turns 
alternate cheeks to the reverberation of a blazing 
world, ninety million miles away. 



What a monstrous spectre is this man, the disease 
of the agglutinated dust, lifting alternate feet or 
lying drugged with slumber; killing, feeding, grow- 
ing, bringing forth small copies of himself; grown 
upon with hair like grass, fitted with eyes that move 
and glitter in his face ; a thing to set children scream- 
ing; — and yet looked at nearlier, known as his 
fellows know him, how surprising are his at- 
tributes! Poor soul, here for so little, cast 
among so many hardships, filled with desires so 
incommensurate and so inconsistent, savagely sur- 
rounded, savagely descended, irremediably con- 
demned to prey upon his fellow lives: who should 
have blamed him had he been of a piece with his 
destiny and a being merely barbarous? And we 
look and behold him instead filled with imperfect 
virtues: infinitely childish, often admirably valiant, 
often touchingly kind; sitting down, amidst his 
momentary life, to debate of right and wrong and 
the attributes of the deity; rising up to do battle 
for an egg or die for an idea ; singling out his friends 



PULVIS ET UMBRA 177 

and his mate with cordial affection; bringing forth 
in pain, rearing with long-suffering solicitude, his 
young. To touch the heart of his mystery, we find 
in him one thought, strange to the point of lunacy: 
the thought of duty ; the thought of something owing 
to himself, to his neighbour, to his God: an ideal 
of decency, to which he would rise if it were possible ; 
a limit of shame, below which, if it be possible, he 
will not stoop. The design in most men is one of 
conformity; here and there, in picked natures, it 
transcends itself and soars on the other side, arming 
martyrs with independence; but in all, in their 
degrees, it is a bosom thought: — Not in man alone, 
for we trace it in dogs and cats whom we know fairly 
well, and doubtless some similar point of honour 
sways the elephant, the oyster, and the louse, of 
whom we know so little:— But in man, at least, it 
sways with so complete an empire that merely selfish 
things come second, even with the selfish : that appe- 
tites are starved, fears are conquered, pains sup- 
ported; that almost the dullest shrinks from the 
reproof of a glance, although it were a child's; and 
all but the most cowardly stand amid the risks of 
war; and the more noble, having strongly conceived 
an act as due to their ideal, affront and embrace 
death. Strange enough if, with their singular origin 
and perverted practice, they think they are to be 
rewarded in some future life : stranger still, if they 
are persuaded of the contrary, and think this blow, 
v^^hich they solicit, will strike them senseless for 
eternity. I shall be reminded what a tragedy of mis- 
conception and misconduct man at large presents: 
of organised injustice, cowardly violence and treach- 
erous crime ; and of the damning imperfections of the 



178 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

best. They cannot be too darkly drawn. Man is 
indeed marked for failure in his efforts to do right. 
But where the best consistently miscarry, how tenfold 
more remarkable that all should continue to strive; 
and surely we should find it both touching and in- 
spiriting, that in a field from which success is ban- 
ished, our race should not cease to labour. 

If the first view of this creature, stalking in his 
rotatory isle, be a thing to shake the courage of the 
stoutest, on this nearer sight, he startles us with an 
admiring wonder. It matters not where we look, 
under what climate we observe him, in what stage of 
society, in what depth of ignorance, burthened with 
what erroneous morality; by camp-fires in Assini- 
boia, the snow powdering his shoulders, the wind 
plucking his blanket, as he sits, passing the ceremo- 
nial calumet and uttering his grave opinions like a 
Roman senator; in ships at sea, a man inured to 
hardship and vile pleasures, his brightest hope a 
fiddle in a tavern and a bedizened trull who sells 
herself to rob him, and he for all that simple, inno- 
cent, cheerful, kindly like a child, constant to toil, 
brave to drown, for others; in the slums of cities,' 
moving among indifferent millions to mechanical em- 
ployments, without hope of change in the future, 
with scarce a pleasure in the present, and yet true 
to^his virtues, honest ud to his lights, kind to his 
neighbours, tempted perhaps in vain by the bright 
gin-palace, perhaps long-suffering with the drunken 
wife that ruins him; in India (a woman this time) 
kneeling with broken cries and streaming tears, as 
she drowns her child in the sacred river; in the 
brothel, the discard of society, living mainly on 
strong drink, fed with affronts, a fool, a thief, the 



PULVIS ET UMBRA 179 

comrade of thieves, and even here keeping the point 
of honour and the touch of pity, often repaying the 
world's scorn with service, often standing firm upon 
a scruple, and at a certain cost, rejecting riches: — 
everywhere some virtue cherished or affected, every- 
where some decency of thought and carriage, every- 
where the ensign of man's ineffectual goodness : — ah ! 
if I could show you this ! if I could show you these 
men and women, all the world over, in every stage 
of history, under every abuse of error, under every 
circumstance of failure, without hope, without help, 
without thanks, still obscurely fighting the lost fight 
of virtue, still clinging, in the brothel or on the 
scaffold, to some rag of honour, the poor jewel of 
their souls ! They may seek to escape, and yet they 
cannot ; it is not alone their privilege and glory, but 
their doom; they are condemned to some nobility; 
all their lives long, the desire of good is at their 
heels, the implacable hunter. 

Of all earth's meteors, here at least is the most 
strange and consoling: that this ennobled lemur, 
this hair-crowned bubble of the dust, this inheritor 
of a few years and sorrows, should yet deny himself 
his rare delights, and add to his frequent pains, and 
live for an ideal, however misconceived. Nor can 
we stop with man. A new doctrine, received with 
screams a little while ago by canting moralists, and 
still not properly worked into the body of our 
thoughts, lights us a step farther into the heart of 
this rough but noble universe. For nowadays the 
pride of man denies in vain his kinship with the 
.original dust. He stands no longer like a thing 
apart. Close at his heels we see the dog, prince of 
another genius: and in him too, we see dumbly 



180 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

testified the same cultus of an unattainable ideal, 
the same constancy in failure. Does it stop with the 
dog? We look at our feet where the ground is 
blackened with the swarming ant : a creature so small, 
so far from us in the hierarchy of brutes, that we 
can scarce trace and scarce comprehend his doings; 
and here also, in his ordered polities and rigorous 
justice, we see confessed the law of duty and the fact 
of individual sin. Does it stop, then, with the ant? 
Rather this desire of well-doing and this doom of 
frailty run through all the grades of life: rather is 
this earth, from the frosty top of Everest to the 
next margin of the internal fire, one stage of inef- 
fectual virtues and one temple of pious tears and 
perseverance. The whole creation groaneth and 
travaileth together. It is the common and the god- 
like law of life. The browsers, the biters, the barkers, 
the hairy coats of field and forest, the squirrel in 
the oak, the thousand-footed creeper in the dust, as 
they share with us the gift of life, share with us 
the love of an ideal: strive like us— like us are 
tempted to grow weary of the struggle— to do well ; 
like us receive at times unmerited refreshment, visit- 
ings of support, returns of courage; and are con- 
demned like us to be crucified between that double 
law of the members and the will. Are they like us, 
I wonder in the timid hope of some reward, some 
sugar with the drug? do they, too, stand aghast at 
unrewarded virtues, at the sufferings of those whom, 
in our partiality, we take to be just, and the pros- 
perity of such as, in our blindness, we call wicked? 
It may be, and yet God knows what they should look 
for. Even while they look, even while they repent, 
the foot of man treads them by thousands in the 



PULVIS ET UMBRA 181 

dust, the yelping hounds burst upon their trail, the 
bullet speeds, the knives are heating in the den of 
the vivisectionist ; or the dew falls, and the generation 
of a day is blotted out. For these are creatures, com- 
pared with whom our weakness is strength, our 
ignorance wisdom, our brief span eternity. 

And as we dwell, we living things, in our isle of 
terror and under the imminent hand of death, God 
forbid it should be man the erected, the reasoner, 
the wise in his own eyes— God forbid it should be 
man that wearies in well-doing, that despairs 
of unrewarded effort, or utters the language of com- 
plaint. Let it be enough for faith, that the whole 
creation groans in mortal frailty, strives with un- 
conquerable constancy : Surely not all in vain. 



NOTES 

DURING the year 1888, part of which was spent 
by Stevenson at Saranac Lake in the Adirondaeks 
he published one article every month in Scribner's 
Magazine. Pulvis et Umbra appeared in the April number, 
and was later included in the volume Across the Plains 
(1892). He wrote this particular essay with intense 
feeling. Writing to Sidney Colvin in December 1887, 
he said, "I get along with my papers for Scribner 
not fast, nor so far specially well; only this last, the 
fourth one. ... I do believe is pulled off after a fashion. 
It is a mere sermon : . . . but it is true, and I find it 
touching and beneficial, to me at least ; and I think there is 
some fine writing in it, some very apt and pregnant 
phrases. Pulvis et Umbra, I call it; I might have called 
it a Darwinian Sermon, if I had wanted. Its sentiments, 
although parsonic, will not offend even you, I believe." 
{Letters, II, 100.) Writing to Miss Adelaide Boodle in 
April 1888, he said, "I wrote a paper the other 
day— Pulvis et Umbra;— 1 wrote it with great feeling 
and conviction: to me it seemed bracing and 
healthful, it is in such a world (so seen by me), 
that I am very glad to fight out my battle, and see 
some fine sunsets, and hear some excellent jests between 
whiles round the camp fire. But I find that to some 
people this vision of mine is a nightmare, and ex- 
tinguishes all ground of faith in God or pleasure in man. 
Truth I think not so much of; for I do not know it. And 
I could wish in my heart that I had not published this 
paper, if it troubles folk too much: all have not the 
same digestion nor the same sight of things. . . . Well, 
I cannot take back what I have said; but yet I may add 



NOTES 183 

this. If my view be everything but the nonsense that it 
may be— to me it seems self-evident and blinding truth— 
surely of all things it makes this world holier. There is 
nothing in it but the moral side— but the great battle and 
the breathing times with their refreshments. I see no 
more and no less. And if you look again, it is not ugly, 
and it is filled with promise." {Letters, II, 123.) The 
words Pulvis et Umbra mean literally "dust and shadow" : 
the phrase, however, is quoted from Horace "pulvis et 
umbra sumus" — we are dust and ashes. It forms the text 
of one of Stevenson's familiar discourses on Death, like 
u^s Triplex. 

Page 173. Find them change with every climate, etc. 
For some striking illustrations of this, see Sudermann's 
drama. Die Ehre (Honour). 

Page 174. NH3 and H2O. The first is the chemical 
formula for ammonia : the second, for water. 

Page 174. That way madness lies. King Lear, III, 4, 21. 

Page 174. A pediculous malady . , , locomotory. Steven- 
son was fond of strange words. "Pediculous" means 
covered with lice, lousy. 

Page 177. The heart of his mystery. Hamlet, Act III, 
Sc. 2, "you would pluck out the heart of my mystery." 
Mystery here means "secret," as in I. Cor. XIII, "Behold, 
I tell you a mystery." 

Page 177. The thought of duty. Kant said, "Two things 
fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and 
awe, the of tener and the more steadily we reflect on them : 
the starry heavens above and the moral law within." 
(Conclusion to the Practical Beason—Kritik der prakti- 
schen Vernunft, 1788.) 

Page 178. Assiniboia . . . Calumet. Assinibioia is a dis- 
trict of Canada, just west of Manitoba. Calumet is the 
pipe of peace, used by North American Indians when 
solemnizing treaties etc. Its stem is over two feet long, 
heavily decorated with feathers etc. 

Page 178. Browns her child in the sacred river. The 



184 STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

sacred river of India is the Ganges ; before British control, 
children were often sacrificed there by drowning to appease 
the angry divinity. 

Page 179. The touch of pity. "No beast so fierce but 
knows some touch of ^iiy J^—Bichard III, Act I, Sc. 2, vs. 
71. This ennobled lemur. A lemur is a nocturnal animal, 
something like a monkey. 

Page 179. A new doctrine. Evolution. Darwin's Ori- 
gin of Species was published in 1859. Many ardent 
Christians believe in its general principles to-day j but at 
first it was bitterly attacked by orthodox and conservative 
critics. A Princeton professor cried, "Darwinism is Athe- 
ism ! " 

Page 180. Cultus. Stevenson liked this word. The 
swarming ant. "The ants are a people not strong, yet 
they prepare their meat in the summer."— Proverbs, XXX. 
25. For a wonderful description of an ant battle, see 
Thoreau's Walden. 

Page 180. Everest. Mount Everest in the Himalayas, is 
the highest mountain in the world, with an altitude of 
about 29,000 feet. 

Page 180. The whole creation groaneth. Romans, VIII, 
22. 

Page 180. That double law of the members. See note, 
p. 140. 

Page 181. Den of the vivisectionist. See note, p. 138. 

Page 181. In our isle of terror. Cf. Herrick, The 
White Island. 

"In this world, the isle of dreams, 
While we sit by sorrow's streams. 
Tears and terrors are our themes." 

Page 181. Man that wearies in well-doing. Galatians, 
VI, 9. 

Page 181. Surely not all in vain. At heart, Stevenson 
belongs not to the pessimists nor the skeptics, but to the 
optimists and the believers. A man may have no formal 
creed, and yet be a believer. 










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